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To know the differenceTue, 29 Jan 2019 00:08:19 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.9Growwiserhttps://feedburner.google.comCircumstances, Agency, and Just Desertshttps://www.growwiser.com/2019/01/23/circumstances-agency-and-just-deserts/
https://www.growwiser.com/2019/01/23/circumstances-agency-and-just-deserts/#respondWed, 23 Jan 2019 15:45:52 +0000https://www.growwiser.com/?p=452Continue reading Circumstances, Agency, and Just Deserts→]]>What is a fair distribution of aid and reward? Although any actual distribution may be driven by pragmatic realities, their underlying justification and general direction rest on an answer to a question: what is a fair measure of individual accomplishment? There are ultimately no nice answers to this question although there are nice-sounding ones. Every answer necessarily exonerates or praises someone. And every exoneration or praise necessary insults someone else.

At the heart of the evaluation is another question: what is a fair weighing of contributions from circumstances and agency to outcomes? Although sophisticated philosophical positions exist denying influence of circumstances or existence of agency, they rarely cohere with everyday actions of even their proponents. The de facto reality is that both matter, but how much each contributed to any specific outcome is up for debate.

Disagreements hang on the difficulty of measurement. Circumstances and agency interact with enough recursion that influence of either can be claimed all the way to debates on free will. Furthermore, circumstances come bundled in complex, interacting packages. Some ease accomplishment while others complicate it. Often, their impact can be interpreted either way: overabundance of helpful circumstances encourages detrimental entitlement, complacency, or false confidence while challenging circumstances foster useful insights, abilities, or motivations.

Nature, Nurture, Luck, and Effort

Circumstances vs agency debates closely mirror – and are intertwined with – nature vs nurture ones. In both cases, any simple answer – whether one, the other, or a fixed mixture of the two – will be simple, elegant, and wrong.

I believe reality is closer to nature setting potentials and nurture enabling their achievement. Natural potentials influence simple capabilities rather than complicated real-world skills. These capabilities bundle, conflict, and pressure in ways that are complex and rarely ubiquitously helpful for real-world expertise. Nature does favor some paths towards competence, but nurture needs to find and develop them or their potential erodes exposing newly optimal alternatives.

It may seem that nature and environment are equally responsible for outcomes, but this isn’t true because potentials offer a range, not a switch. Except where nature-granted potentials are unusually low or where performance goals are extreme, reaching full potential isn’t necessary for achievement. Adequacy rarely requires a disproportionate allotment of natural potential.

Furthermore, because potentials interact and conflict, there are many combinations that permit competence in specific skills and a combinatorially greater number that offer a path to basic life success. Nature’s optimal route is rarely, if ever, found anyway. It seems that nature sets the limits at extremes of abilities and goals while nurture retains control over more typical situations and outcomes.

Circumstances and agency have a similar interplay between opportunity and effort through interacting, conflicting potentials. Nature and nurture are both circumstances, along with other forms of luck. Together, they map a multitude of possible paths, including an optimal one that is unlikely to be found, but pursuing any of them entails risks and costs; choosing among them employs agency; approaching their potential requires effort and sacrifice.

Although abilities to apply effort and endure costs themselves have circumstantial components, they also have agency ones – with interaction between both going back to earliest stages of development. One could take the extreme position of denying the possibility of agency completely, but such a claim would invalidate the original question: if actions flow inexorably from circumstances this includes actions that grant rewards or cast blame. Either the agent bears some responsibility for their outcomes or the rest of us bear none for our treatment of the agent.

A fair evaluation of individual accomplishment measures how closely they approached potential provided by their circumstances. Regardless of how fortuitous the circumstances, the only way to get closer to potential provided by them is to better exert agency. Fairest rewards honor best agency, not success itself. Fairest aid compensates for unbalanced circumstances, not for failure itself. But since we have limited visibility into both individual circumstances and individual application of agency, we come back to the difficulty of measurement.

Sympathizers can spurn any limitation on circumstances’ impact and any doubt of effort’s completeness with “How would you know?” Skeptics can rebuff any claim of doing one’s best with “How can I believe you?”

Causes, Reasons, Excuses, and Responsibility

We need to compare the reasonableness of claims despite imperfect information and suspect incentives. To do this, we first need to understand how unreasonableness sneaks in.

I will stick to the best-case scenario of good-faith claims. They leave plenty of paths to unfairness, which bad faith can manipulate or stack upon. A good-faith actor genuinely believes that their actions were justifiable and would accept responsibility for them otherwise. Acceptance of responsibility entails not being deserving of reward or aid despite positive outcomes or difficult circumstances. Reward or aid may, of course, be provided nevertheless, but would be an error or a gift rather than just deserts.

The essence of evaluation is in assessment of justifications. There are two main types of justifications: reasons and excuses. Reasons claim that the action was correct while excuses claim that the actor is not responsible for the action.1Marcia Baron’s “Justifications and Excuses” article from the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law helped me develop the concepts in this section. Note that justification and excuse are legal terms of art while my usage is closer to everyday meanings. My use of reason aligns with legal use of justification while I use justification more generally. Reasons are proud, excuses are meek. Reasons demand recognition, excuses seek sympathy. Reasons embrace agency, excuses welcome circumstances.

There are two broad categories of reasons. One claims an exception to the standard action in specific circumstances: “I was late because I stopped to rescue a drowning child.” The other questions desirability of the standard action in general: “I don’t think we should extol punctuality because it stifles creativity.”

There are also two broad categories of excuses. One blames unavoidable misfortune for making the desirable outcome impossible to reach or unusual stress for making the proper action too difficult to choose or perform: “I was late because of traffic” or “The appointment slipped my mind because of everything that went wrong this week.” The other claims a general inability to perform the proper action due to individual characteristics: “I am forgetful.”

General excuses are counterbalanced by unfairness of free-riding. If the general excuse is legitimate, then it is fair to hold the actor blameless. However, as it is unfair to have freedom without responsibility for its use, the actor cannot fairly retain agency that depends on abilities they do not possess. They must either relinquish future exercise of those abilities to a conservator or they must accept responsibility despite having a valid excuse.

General reasons are counterbalanced similarly. No matter how superior the proposed alternative is, it always carries costs. Some of these costs are bound to be different from the standard costs, just as some of the benefits are different. Such costs are often at the core of the condemnation and one cannot deny responsibility for them simply by extolling benefits. If greater punctuality indeed makes one less creative, then the price of additional creativity is partially in the consequences of being less punctual – and the price of increased punctuality is partially in the consequences of lesser creativity. The consequences cannot be lightened without unfairly trivializing the sacrifices of the alternative.

It could be argued that the status quo brings unfair benefits to those who follow it and exerts unfair costs on those who do not simply by the virtue of being the status quo. But it also furnishes an environment that unfairly lowers costs and increases benefits of the alternate arrangement: the creative maverick free-rides on the punctuality of the status quo world and gains from its lower standards of creativity. And altering norms unfairly breaks agreements and punishes preparation.

If the general reason is motivated more by changing the world than by justifying individual preferences, then costs and benefits of the action become secondary to those of being a pioneer, a revolutionary, a critic. While such costs can be severe, the benefits of success are also disproportionately grand. And lowering these costs unfairly snubs uprightness and conventional excellence.

Specific reasons and excuses are more particular and nuanced, but one-sided attempts to free-ride are as prevalent as with general categories. They must be detected to approach a fair evaluation. There are two broad types: treating influences as causes and discounting countervailing influences.

Truth and Legitimacy of Justifications

It is not enough for specific reasons or excuses to be true: to be legitimate they also need to be the primary cause of the outcome or be combined with other reasons and excuses to add up to a primary cause. Traffic is not the primary cause of lateness if it delayed arrival by less than the lateness; or if traffic was likely for the trip; or if discoverable, alternate routes were available; or if a substandard cushion was allotted for contingencies and the delay was below the standard allowance. Traffic could still be consequential by making timely arrival more difficult and magnifying the consequences of lateness. It can fairly be called a disadvantage, but it is not by itself a cause and hence is not a legitimate justification.

An interacting mess of circumstances and abilities envelops all action. Each has some potential to disadvantage us. Each has some room for exercise of agency. Facing a disadvantage shows little by itself: disadvantages are everywhere.

How close to a cause a set of disadvantages comes depends on how close to inevitability is the chance that they produce the outcome blamed on them. How much room there is for agency depends on how much disadvantages could be prevented or managed with optimal decisions. How capably the agent acted depends on how fully they utilized their abilities. And how responsible they are is influenced by how well they directed agency over time to develop the potential of relevant abilities.

A similar calculus applies to measuring the impact of advantages. The influence of agency over what potentials materialize into cannot be downplayed.

Furthermore, appeals to disadvantages (and advantages) tend to disregard existence of the other: while the disadvantage of traffic is presented, the advantage of barely catching a long light is ignored. The mess of circumstances creates both potential advantages and potential disadvantages. Although they don’t have to equalize, they do balance somewhat; disregarding one of them generates unfairness.

Such one-sidedness corrupts not only evaluation of responsibility, but determination of aid or reward. Even if circumstances bear legitimate responsibility for a specific unfair outcome, full compensation is not necessarily fair. One cannot fairly demand to be made whole after losing their wallet while ignoring the wad of cash found on the street a month earlier. Unfair outcomes occur frequently. Some unfairly benefit us, some unfairly hurt us. A fair demand for compensation must subtract unfairly received benefits, especially when the two are connected. This often saps the appeal of its potency.

A similar calculus again applies to reductively counting advantages. Fair amount of reward or aid rests on balancing positive and negative circumstances.

The Choice

Accurate estimation of contributions from circumstances and agency to an outcome requires information that isn’t typically known reliably and careful calculation that isn’t typically performed. Yet we feel confidence in our assessments and a compulsion to share them. Arguments spread beyond the immediately affected to engulf outsiders within shouting distance. Technological amplification of this distance empowers participation to rapidly approach massive scale.

I think that, in a nutshell, we feel confident because we substitute sympathy for informational reliability and plausibility for calculation. And we feel compelled because our sympathies tie to the way we measure ourselves.

Most everyone defines goodness with some combination of competence, integrity, and kindness; claims earned successes and justified failures; validates with a mixture of effort and explanation; corroborates through external recognition; and sympathizes with stories compatible with one’s definitions, justifications, efforts, outlooks – with one’s identity.

The multitude of causes and circumstances permit many plausible narratives. Inaccessibility of individual experiences enables both uncharitable assumptions and heartfelt exaggerations. It may seem a justifiable and inexpensive kindness to give the benefit of the doubt, to side with the sympathy-arousing, to accept outcomes as evidence for plausible causes.

Yet, every such kindness necessarily insults someone else. Yes, implications that one did not do their best generate defensiveness and resentment. And being blamed beyond one’s fault is maddening. But implications that one’s best wasn’t theirs also generate defensiveness and resentment. Not being given one’s due for effort is also maddening. And having one’s best striving interpreted as inappropriate, insignificant, or iniquitous is even worse: it is infuriating and demoralizing to be scolded for something one expects to be lauded for.

But you can’t have one without the other. To give the benefit of the doubt to justifications is to dismiss, devalue, or denounce accomplishments of those who pushed past making them. Uncertainty allows us to assuage natural compassion by giving circumstances a greater power to excuse failure or dismiss success. But it also allows us to assuage natural admiration by giving agency a greater role. An objectively correct assessment may exist, but is rarely accessible.

The choice of whom to give the benefit of the doubt, of whether to bias towards circumstances or agency under uncertainty cannot be neutral or objective – although it can be more or less so. It ties to the way we perceive the world and the direction we want to move it. Underneath all interpretations is a key choice of framing: to view the situation through a lens of disadvantages or possibilities. And underneath all action is a similar choice of where to put weight and effort: on gathering justifications or on overcoming obstacles.

At extreme applications of this choice we get the archetypes of Victims – who consistently reject responsibility – and Heroes – who consistently reject the power of circumstances. While few uphold such extremes, the heroic ideal of taking maximal responsibility and striving to reach the potential of each situation is commonly exemplified. And the more relaxed ideal of taking sufficient responsibility to justify comfortable happiness is commonly applied.

Assessment

Actor’s position on this continuum in the situation under investigation is among the more objective measures available for assessing the extent of their exertion. We do not need to know the potential made possible by their circumstances to believe that maximum application of effort is necessary to reach it. And we can reasonably ascertain that seeking justifications and being content with lower standards is incompatible with such maximum application. The only way to do your true best, and to know it, is to always act Heroically: to exhaustively seek mistakes before considering excuses.

This doesn’t mean that doing your best is always necessary or even possible. There are inherent tensions in judging performance: both condemnation of adequacy and insufficiently praised striving are troublesome. There are inherent trade-offs between development of different abilities: it isn’t possible to approach full potential in all areas. There are inherent risks to any action: failures of even the best probabilistic decisions can expose alternatives with better effects on something.2Consider how intense workload risks mistakes and burnout while forced stops endanger flow and necessary progress; how gaining relaxation to enhance performance in one area may entail laxity in another.

Many justifications thus remain available to the actor, but all are limited by countervailing free-riding constraints. One is free to appeal to general excuses, but must accept the price of losing freedoms contingent on not making them. One is free to make trade-offs, take risks, and choose their level of effort, but cannot treat undesirable natural consequences of such choices as unfair punishments. One is free to place reasonable borders around their definition of doing one’s best, but cannot expect it to carry the excusing power of the unbounded definition.

And because choices have cumulative effects on circumstances and abilities, there is no fair statute of limitations on responsibility for them. One can legitimately connect decisions made long ago with present outcomes, be proud of them, and feel cheated when old mistakes of others are exonerated. If statutes of limitations make practical sense nevertheless, their fair adoption must at least commensurably demote applicability of ancient circumstances.

But regardless of artificial prohibitions, agent’s abilities and circumstances do recursively depend on earlier circumstances and choices with no indisputable end. If the actuality of these isn’t accessible, how close to an objective assessment can we get?

Actors have the most information so we have to consider their self-assessment. Of course, they also have the greatest tendency and incentive to self-justify and see information selectively. If given primary authority to decide whether they’ve done their best, few will use the power against their own interests – or even develop the ability and awareness to be able to – so we cannot rely on self-assessment alone. The quality of our assessment depends on how well we can ascertain the accuracy of agent’s claims and on how much objective information we can gather to integrate with them.

In any specific situation we can evaluate options available to agency; compare outcomes and justification frequencies with others in similar circumstances; attempt to disentangle the influence of individual limitations and preferences from situational context. We can then recursively apply a similar analysis to causes of limitations, preferences, and circumstances to untwine earlier choices from earlier contexts and approach an estimation of actor’s responsibility and trustworthiness.

This process depends on situational domain knowledge and contextual understanding; on perceptions and competence of those who know the agent; on access to the history of actor’s past assessments and attempts at improvement. The quantity and quality of this information depends on length and intensity of agent’s participation in communities, on meticulousness of record keeping, on communal norms. Of course, these come with their own questions of trustworthiness and incentive so we cannot rely on them alone either.

Agent’s self-evaluations; expert and statistical estimations of accessible options; analysis of agent’s action history; and judgements of those familiar with the agent must all be integrated with care and skepticism to approach a reasonable assessment. Inaccessibility, or biased weighing, of any of them severely affects accuracy.

The Conflict

Choices of assessors incentivize choices of actors. These choices influence development of abilities and values. The process of development shapes locus of control, need for achievement, and understanding of competence. Since abilities, understandings, and values influence objectivity and tendency to self-justify, they affect the quality of actors’ self-assessments. Since actors also observe and assess others, their competence and integrity affects the quality of external assessments. And since visible acceptance of choices creates a sense of normalcy around them, the process shifts expectation thresholds. These exert a pull on individuals and institutions; transform sympathies, standards, and statistics; strengthen the feedback loop.

The choice of bias not only picks winners in specific circumstances, but encourages one set of norms and behaviors while discouraging another. It alters the standard for acceptable excuses, affects whether justification or effort are viewed as superior, and influences the moral perception of excuse making. It threatens to shift sympathies and assessment capabilities towards reinforcement of itself.

By leaning towards circumstances and explanations, by shifting expectations towards defensibility and sufficiency we devalue competence, encourage comfort, and enable victimhood. We also reduce undeserved suffering and the power of fortunate individuals. Conversely, by leaning towards agency and effort, by shifting expectations towards responsibility and excellence we devalue contentment, encourage perfectionism, and enable victim blaming. We also reduce undeveloped potential and the power of mobs united by accessible excuses.

Evaluations of individual accomplishment are partially battles over recognition. They are not limited to directly affected participants because they validate or shun standards by which individuals measure themselves. These standards are giants tied not only to individual identity, but to the perceived future of society. An attack on them is deeply personal, disorienting, and disturbing. Yet, they are encompassing enough that every statement risks being an assessment and attack. Every praise insults and every insult praises. This makes expression of opinions ubiquitous and the fight between cultures of honor, dignity, and victimhood full of incomprehension and rage.

Marcia Baron’s “Justifications and Excuses” article from the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law helped me develop the concepts in this section. Note that justification and excuse are legal terms of art while my usage is closer to everyday meanings. My use of reason aligns with legal use of justification while I use justification more generally.

2.

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Consider how intense workload risks mistakes and burnout while forced stops endanger flow and necessary progress; how gaining relaxation to enhance performance in one area may entail laxity in another.

]]>https://www.growwiser.com/2019/01/23/circumstances-agency-and-just-deserts/feed/0Dictionary of Arguments and Positionshttps://www.growwiser.com/2018/10/01/dictionary-of-arguments-and-positions/
https://www.growwiser.com/2018/10/01/dictionary-of-arguments-and-positions/#respondMon, 01 Oct 2018 16:43:01 +0000https://www.growwiser.com/?p=425Continue reading Dictionary of Arguments and Positions→]]>I’ve long been bothered by impediments to good-faith inquiry and difficulty of accurate information transmission. Positions seem disadvantaged by candor and sophistication. This tempts disillusionment, carelessness, and manipulativeness.

While some difficulties are inescapable, I’ve begun to feel that many are created or nurtured by outdated expectations and tools we bring to discourse. I am not yet confident that my thoughts coalesce into a coherent and achievable alternative, but they feel far enough along to attempt relaying.

Incoherence

If you approach complaints, requests, demands, suggestions, and pleas with an open mind you’ll look for truth and coherence in them. If you also approach them with compassion and optimism you’ll want aid them. If integrity is important, you’ll attempt to adjust personal and institutional action hierarchies to incorporate resulting truths, constraints, and goals. With enough effort and sacrifice you might make progress and feel more confident, driven, virtuous, and wise.

But each new request adds facts, constraints, and desires that make integration with previously assimilated requests increasingly difficult. Eventually, even the most resourceful and determined will relent and admit that demands cannot be reconciled. Desires, axioms, and constraints of independently reasonable requests conflict with each other; to make progress, one has to choose.

Such conflicts are too fundamental to be confined to overtly incompatible positions. Ostensibly sensible combinations of requests and positions hide incoherence. Usually, inconsistencies simply aren’t sought. Sometimes, they are obscured by seemingly innocuous justifications.1As W. V. Quine argued in Two Dogmas of Empiricism: “Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system.” Occasionally, consistency itself is downplayed. In one way or another, positions often end up depending on premises that are trivialized, denied, or disproved elsewhere.

Or maybe it just seems that way. Maybe there is misunderstanding rather than negligence, ignorance, or hypocrisy. After all, no one knows all the truths and constraints we are trying to balance. No one knows the amount of effort we’ve put into coherence or the sacrifices we’ve made to accommodate requests of others. No one understands the precise problem we are trying to solve. Perhaps, not even ourselves. Of course, no one knows all the mistakes we’ve made either.

But whether incoherence is real or imagined, it must be untangled to approach truth. Unfortunately, the responsible axioms and connections hide well.

Even with good faith, we talk past each other because we are solving different problems. We misunderstand because these problems aren’t adequately defined. We make logical errors because the same challenges apply within ourselves.

Repetitiveness and Verbosity

There is little new under the sun. Attempts to explain, prove, and understand involve an overwhelming amount of duplication. This duplication makes continued engagement difficult. Positions become cliches. Arguments become strawmen. Inquiries become annoyances. Adversaries become contemptible.

But careful attention, steelmanning, and avoidance of platitudes just leads to complex prose that duplicates in unique, verbose, error-prone ways. Instead of glossing over with compression and simplification, it obscures with volume and nuance. Instead of being countered with opposing platitudes, it gets countered with misunderstanding and pedantry.

There are good reasons for quality content to retrace territory. It validates author’s understanding of the subject and of their interlocutor’s arguments. It makes the material a more complete work that can stand alone. It makes the subject more accessible to curious bystanders.

But reasons like these come from a time when knowledge was precious and difficult to access. They make less sense in a world of online resources, cheap publishing, and volumes of content optimized for every conceivable audience. Yet publications continue to retrace enough territory to bury their core point. Indeed, resulting discussion rarely ends up centered on anything likely to have been one.

Difficulty of Making Progress

Incoherence, repetitiveness, and verbosity wouldn’t be so bad if language was precise: we could retrace the argument with a bit of effort. Unfortunately, it is anything but.

Every sentence brings a possibility of mistaken construction or interpretation. Every simplification, metaphor, or example can be confused for the point itself or questioned on its accuracy and relevance. Possible interpretations multiply with every statement, repetition, ambiguity, and mistake.

Nor would it be so bad if we had perfect recall: we could return to potential conflicts together with context and when we did resolve issues, we’d remember how we did it. Unfortunately, all we get is a faint intuition of inconsistency.

It takes much error-prone effort to approach the state where we formed connections that now appear suspect. And we remain uncertain of its differences from the original. This can be true even within the confines of a conversation and only worsens with time. We progress by turning solutions into magic and the process is rarely reversible. Even when our magic is a result of exhaustive inquiry, after a enough time we might only be able to stare blankly at an interlocutor who questions it.

Positions as Computer Programs

Positions are comparable to computer programs: they encode beliefs into systems that provide answers to questions posed by incoming data. Like computer programs they are susceptible to flaws: from invalid assumptions to logical errors, from misprocessed input to unclear output. And computer programs demonstrate just how large, delicate, and complex the task of making positions explicit is.

But while software engineering has evolved to reduce the burden and risk, argumentation remains barely at punch cards. We continue to interact with positions through ancient approaches despite availability of modern resources, despite the variety and intricacy of modern positions, despite them arguably encoding more information than complex programs.

It is terrifying to imagine modern software without code reuse, side-effect management, automated testing, version control, interactive debugging. Every line of code in every program written from scratch: referencing the work of others, but always reinterpreting and rewriting it in unique ways. Haphazard jumps between program areas being modified. Little verification that changes leave working code. Loose, if any, tracking of the logic behind, or the content of, such jumps and changes. Limited ability to deterministically trace through running code.

Argumentation is worse than even that. It’s like we try to modify the same code base, but all insist on using separate evolving languages to implement different goals based on distinct assumptions while presuming that our beliefs and intentions are too obvious to be misunderstood. And we all feel entitled to change other people’s code at will. Incoherence, misunderstanding, repetitiveness, verbosity, and disillusionment indeed.

Essence of the Issue

The core of the problem is that we don’t store positions in an accessible manner. We develop them through a messy combination of reading, experience, thought, and interaction. Then we turn them into inaccessible magic or relay them using error-prone communication.

Original beliefs and goals become fuzzy. The ‘aha’ moments and their supporting circumstances – so crucial to the path we end up taking – lose their clarity. We feel evermore compelled to explain, but rarely end up feeling more understood. And we can’t truly understand positions of others without going through a painstaking, unique, error-prone process comparable to theirs.

Which is stupefying and infuriating because while the specific hierarchy of axioms, constraints, and goals that drives our action and understanding is highly individual, perhaps even unique, few, if any, of the parts are. Nearly every component has been extensively argued, researched, and experimented with. Each has been subdivided into nearly every possible set of coherent axioms, trade-offs, and conclusions. Many of these sets have been named. We should be able to build our positions simply by selecting canonical versions of components that match our beliefs.

The components aren’t beyond doubt or improvement. But as with code libraries and the DRY programming principle, we should reserve unique explanations and proofs for integrations, deviations, and extensions where we hope to add value. We should not attempt them unnecessarily en route to somewhere else.

The good news is that the work humanity has done over thousands of years to discover, cohere, elaborate, and name these different components is readily accessible. The bad news is that it is accessible in written form with all its imperfections. And many people have generated many words interpreting, reinterpreting, clarifying, embellishing, and confusing these positions so we can’t trust that use of same terms describes the same underlying beliefs.

The issue isn’t primarily that of authority. From Wikipedia to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy we have accessible and trustworthy-enough sources that attempt to catalogue the world’s knowledge: that is, to describe, defend, and connect canonical positions. But they only end up being summarized, misunderstood, and reinterpreted like all the rest. I believe this fate awaits every text. What blocks modern discourse are focus and format more than content.

Premises-Centered Communication

Conflict between the relative importance of evidence and logic on one side and presentation on the other has existed for millennia. But with increasingly obsessive focus on these, we seem to have lost sight that premises are the essence of positions. To have your premises understood is to be understood. The content is overwhelmingly within them.

To engage in truth-seeking communication we must be clear on the premises before we question the evidence or deductions, before we apply rhetorical flair. Furthermore, imperfections in evidence, logic, or presentation do not necessarily invalidate the beliefs themselves – kind of like the quality of an attorney does not affect the underlying truth even when it changes the outcome of a case.

Our conclusions rely on premises. And our premises rely on evidence. But evidence itself relies on lower-level premises. While many premises are indeed disprovable, at the bottom of all premises lies belief. We cannot hope for a completely objective hierarchy. But we can attempt to accurately pinpoint the underlying beliefs.

Ideal formatting of positions focuses on the premises. It makes underlying beliefs accessible. It connects them to accepted evidence and chosen trade-offs. It traces a path to them from conclusions and constraints. It is naturally a graph and a database, not a description or a narrative.

Presentation

For the premises to remain obvious, presentation must be concise and visual: like a diagram or an outline. The why and how, the evidence and counter-arguments, the alternatives and constraints should only present themselves when inquiry reaches their level. They must not overwhelm the axioms.

Argument structure is largely hierarchical. Each premise is an input into higher-level premises and a conclusion of lower-level premises all the way down to fundamental beliefs. Each node hides a hierarchy. These sub-hierarchies must be accessible when desired without distracting the rest of the time: as with expandable tree nodes or outline points.

Of course, positions aren’t pure hierarchies. They are graphs where premises and conclusions are shared among nodes. A fundamental belief can be a relevant premise to our positions on many levels and for many topics. To show correct connections the interface must be much more intelligent than that of a hierarchical diagram or outline.

The immediate benefit of such presentation is enabling focus on the right level when thinking or conversing. But to facilitate it, positions need to be defined by connected sets of premises rather described by prose. This structure brings other benefits.

Structure

Explicit definitions enable canonical positions to be used much like software libraries: large portions of action hierarchies can be built from trustworthy components without maintaining expertise in each piece.

An inference engine can validate that conclusions follow from premises eliminating much unnecessary debate over logic. It can find contradictions in seemingly unrelated positions or confirm that potential adjustments are coherent, again eliminating discourse that adds little value. It can identify areas impacted by changes to beliefs and canonical positions, easing restoration of coherence undermined by updated models.

Accessible, structured positions can free us from effort that duplicates rather than advances. We could finally focus on areas that actually lead to progress: improvement, discovery, and definition of canonical positions; connection of them in novel ways; and implementation of their conclusions to improve action, validate positions, and generate new hypotheses. Much like software libraries, they would unleash generativity.

Storage

Accessible, structured storage doesn’t just enhance understanding and advancement of positions, but preserves the history of such advancement. It leaves a natural trail, much like version control, and makes it easy to identify arguments or experiences that forced adjustments.

Similarly, and no less importantly, it enables understanding and advancement of ourselves. The traditional way to preserve growth in individual thinking has been to keep a journal, but this is both difficult enough that few persist and susceptible to the inaccuracy and inaccessibility of prose.

The product of this growth is an ever-improving, accessible presentation backed by canonical arguments and contextualized by belief-changing experiences: a memoir of us and a manual to our beliefs.

Arguments and Positions

Argument and position are distinct terms, but so intimately connected, and in many instances interchangeable, that I sometimes struggle with which to use. In conventional argumentation terminology, a position is the conclusion defended by argument.

For me, a position is a set of beliefs more than a conclusion. Conclusions do embody belief sets. And those beliefs are defended, connected, and extended with arguments. But while the objective of an argument is to answer a question, the objective of a position is to define a belief set.

Positions usually include multiple, possibly unconnected, hierarchies of arguments and embody a larger set of beliefs than is necessary for any specific conclusion. They demand consistency over time and events while arguments are only concerned with truth and coherence within the scope of the question.

Positions are thus more a property of agents than of questions. Although they can provide answers and be defended objectively, their integrity is ultimately inseparable from the history of agent’s actions. Arguments, on the other hand, remain objectively valid even if agents deploy contradictory premises elsewhere. And connected premises unemployed by the argument are externalities irrelevant to correctness.2Minimally consistent (MINCON) arguments are, in fact, encouraged.

Arguments focus on inferences, choices, and evidence that defend conclusions with premises while positions focus on exposing and cohering the baggage of premises that conclusions bring.

Premises-centered communication is about positions.

The distinction between arguments and positions causes disconnect in conversations about debate. While many are concerned with barriers to the flow of arguments and opinions, I believe the main impediment to truth-seeking debate are insufficiently developed and transparent positions.

These positions don’t have to be complete, deterministic, or indisputable to be useful. Premises rooted in stipulations, probabilities, pragmatic trade-offs, or faith have their place. But such premises still create commitments, force commensurably lower confidence, and raise the threshold for dismissing similarly imprecise positions of others.

Explicit positions incentivize clarity, consistency, care, and improvement. Only interlocutors with them have much chance to advance cohering debate.

Accessibility and engagement can provide a survey of popular opinion, enlighten brainstorming, and perform valuable devil’s advocate-type stress-testing. But it is so easy to make premises without sufficient constraints outside the argument powerful that they are of limited use in pursuit of truth.

Such requests are overwhelmingly, but not entirely, repetitive. They occasionally center on legitimate flaws, correctable ambiguities, or coherent alternatives. But usually they are driven by brash ignorance, laziness, or entitlement prompting formulaic responses, passive-aggressiveness, and anguished cries to RTFM.

Similarly, when someone expresses concerns or offers solutions akin to “x, but without y” they’ve occasionally understood the constraints, thought through the consequences, and are presenting a coherent alternative. But usually they are just saying “I like x” and “I don’t like y.” There is no reliable method to tell from the inquiry itself and assuming either invites expensive failures.

If you surprise me with with a claim, I don’t want to choose between taking you at your word; assuming you are overconfident or self-centered; or trying a time-consuming, triggering-prone, improbable, and highly perishable task of merging action hierarchies with a single person. I want to see how you square that circle. I want to read the manual of you.

Position graphs are such manuals. They showcase sophistication of underlying thoughts, identify levels for productive conversation, and help agents reach stronger positions over time.

They enable the owner – who has maximal information, experience, and incentive – to bring accurate position state to discourse rather than placing the burden of fumbling in the dark to generate it anew on the lap of each interlocutor.

Implementation Areas

There are many aspects to advancing this vision: from alteration of common assumptions and craft standards to development of new tools and rethinking of existing ones. Fortunately, changes don’t have to come together or be implemented perfectly to aid progress and work is already proceeding in a compatible direction.

Writing

In writing we need to renew emphasis on premises and conclusions, create more modular text, and integrate visualization of content’s structure with the text.

On a basic level, clarity of premises and conclusions is par course of standard, albeit simplistic, advice on structuring paragraphs with topic and concluding sentences and essays with clear thesis and concluding paragraphs.

On a deeper level, evidence, arguments, anecdotes, metaphors, examples, and narrative have overshadowed premises, beliefs, and conclusions. In a world soaked with homogeneous superstitions countered by fledgeling faith in objective truth, this was progress. In a world soaked with contradictory evidence and opinion fueled by limitations of this faith, it is a distraction. Beliefs underlie all positions and premises must be understood before evidence can matter or rhetorical tools can be honorably deployed.

A simple way to emphasize is to remove as much of everything else as possible. Instead of restating or summarizing supporting arguments, evidence, positions, and examples writing should move towards referencing them. But less with copious bibliographies and footnotes found in academic books and more with inline links.

Academic books attempt to be self-contained works where the author covers territory in their own words. References credit influences, validate content, and provide paths to additional research whereas links naturally abstract details better covered elsewhere and encourage focus on unique contributions.

Linking generates more modular text than copying or retelling. Modules, libraries, functions, objects, and similar abstractions have long been used in programming to avoid duplication, reduce mistakes, aid clarity, manage complexity, and enable progress by specialization. It’s time for writing to do the same.

Modular writing creates text that is intended for integration with other text. It picks a narrow, linkable thesis, covers it well, and resists tempting tangents. Modules provide authoritative and clear answers to precise questions. They define a position, support a premise, provide an example, defend a claim. They link to modules needed for their goal and are linked to by modules that need them. They can theoretically combine to make an entire action hierarchy explicit.

Such visualizations can be intimately integrated with the text, especially in electronic mediums. Breadcrumbs can show reader’s path through content. A map of neighboring connections can appear next to the paragraph. Dependencies, like low-level axioms and important conclusions, can be presented in context.

But visualizations can clarify, connect, and expose not only content, but structure. With suitable tools, authors could encode premises and core ideas, topic sentences and conclusions, arguments and evidence. This metadata can help separate structure, content, and presentation. Readers could then hide, arrange, and format text to focus on specifics they need. And essentials could be visually distinguished from supporting text that has not, or cannot, be replaced by references.

Although electronic medium offers the most exciting possibilities, once structural information has been identified, it can also be used to clarify print with formatting, indexing, and supplements. There is much room to improve clarity of printed text if we accept the primacy of premises.3For example, Deirdre McCloskey brilliantly took the idea of topic sentences to its extreme in Bourgeois Equality. Each chapter is titled with a topic sentence to aid orienting. Furthermore, the sentences are structured such that the table of contents can be read as her argument.

Visualization

Visualization needs to become a commonplace way to summarize content, model it, and engage with it in a structured manner. Visualizations need to allow interactive changes to focus and detail level, handle relationships that aren’t linear or hierarchical, link components with resources, and be searchable.

The primary purpose of visualization is to reduce content to its essentials and enable navigation. But what is essential depends on whether the focus is on what is believed, on why it is deemed important to believe, or on what justifies the belief. With a static medium like paper, this demands constraining context. Electronic mediums can achieve this goal with dynamic changes to detail level, focal point, and presentation format. They can produce visualizations that are as simple as possible, but not simpler: that neither overwhelm with the unnecessary nor omit the essential.

Zoomed out views and more linear perspectives can highlight the general structure or major components of the argument. Selecting a component can reveal details while restricting display to nearby goals and dependencies. Repetitive zooming can illuminate system function down to fundamental premises and supporting evidence. Zooming out can remind why each level is important.

Visualization not only aids understanding and discovery, but helps recovery from level changes. Dives into evidence or implementation details, climbs to goals or connections, and digressions into examples or general principles can be undertaken with less fear of getting lost: visualization can track and bookmark, leaving a thread to bring one out of the labyrinth.

Some visualization formats, like mind maps and outlines, are designed for hierarchical relationships and cannot accommodate non-linear connections. This restriction may be optimal for modeling linear processes like writing. It may aid clarity. Or it may be necessitated by interfaces that can’t emphasize connections effectively. But it is too limiting for general presentation of content. Visualization tools need to advance to enable a variety of connections while maintaining clarity.

Visualization components also need the capacity to reference information outside the presentation. Nodes might reference content that they summarize such as definitions, evidence, a section of content, another visualization, or the underlying position graph. Edges might reference relationship details such as type, evidence, or the underlying argument graph. This not only makes the visualization more useful for understanding, but enhances its role in content navigation.

Finally, the ability to search is important for large presentations to minimize duplication during entry and find indirectly connected content.

Knowledge Representation

A focus on premises benefits greatly from premises-centered knowledge representation. Visualization demands may guide data storage design as much as presentation. But regardless of implementation, information storage needs to aid visualization and its integration with content, be accessible to computer programs, and enable sharing and interoperability.

Structured data allows programs that not only generate visualizations, but verify logic. Programs that can validate integrity of positions after changes, simulate scenarios, or perform updates to incorporate new evidence or changed beliefs.

And structured data enables sharing of information. To advance, we need the ability to reference and integrate portions of other positions. Even if formats are different, structured data enables a degree of integration that slows the tide of duplication.

The Dictionary

Finally, we need to locate canonical positions, arguments, and examples; convert them into premises-centered, visualization-friendly, interoperable formats; and create accessible repositories enabling them to be found and referenced.

It feels too ambitious to be possible, but then so would a regular dictionary. Yet early versions were often completed by a single person and repeatedly expanded upon by motivated individuals – all without computers and online resources.

We have the benefit of many canonical positions being more or less refined and defined in resources like Wikipedia, with some already supplemented by limited structured data. We can begin by formalizing fundamental positions from fields like sociology, economics, psychology, philosophy.

We also have formal ontologies for many specialized domains thanks to machine learning projects. We can connect, extend, and refactor these towards the goal of a unified dictionary.

Argument maps are already used to structure debates and formalize arguments. They can coalesce into valuable dictionary entries despite remaining one step removed from foundations of disagreement by being argument-focused.

We can also attack the problem from the other direction by attempting to create position graphs for ourselves and our opponents in everyday debates. The double crux approach can help. The process illuminates and traverses interlocutors’ position graphs even when it terminates in disagreement over unfalsifiable beliefs instead of converging on a shared, testable hypothesis.

Finally, we can extract metaphors and examples into their own dictionary entries.

Eventually, portions of imprecise personal positions will connect to formalized foundations and become more expansive and solid. With time, comprehensive positions will emerge that connect foundational premises to everyday conclusions with canonical arguments, clarify them with canonical examples, and represent them by canonical graphs.

The task is overwhelming, but progress can be made if we accept a more modest goal than perfection: the goal of making future movement in this direction easier. Each fundamental position that is formalized is a gain. Every specialized ontology and improvement to ontology generation pushes us forward. Each piece of content that is refactored towards modularity helps. Every development in manuals of us is progress.

Chicken and Egg

Formalization and visualization are difficult and time consuming. And they are likely to end up ignored, outdated, or forgotten. It is hard to justify working on them without tools and repositories that lower barriers, enable accessibility, and assure relevance.

So we are in a classic predicament. It isn’t worthwhile to add content without the tools, there isn’t enough demand to make the tools worth building, and to grow demand we need more content.

Fortunately, perfect tools aren’t necessary to prime the pump. It may well be that such tools aren’t possible. What is necessary is the ability to input essential relationships and export them in a sensible format. We need confidence that our efforts produce something extensible and will not be lost.

Challenges and Objections

A major problem with this approach is effort it adds and competence it demands. But questions would remain even if tools eliminated such burdens.

There are challenges to the feasibility of the approach:

Can argument and position graphs encode the content? Can challenges of duplication and clarity be solved across massive ontologies? Natural language is not just less precise, but more expressive than formal logic and explicit ontology.

Can compartmentalization of pathos, ethos, and logos be effective? Can structured arguments and positions be understood and accepted? Can sufficient respect for tacit knowledge be retained? Formalization takes non-fiction to its extreme while fiction has a long history of successfully relaying complex concepts.

Can repositories be trusted? Can positions be reliably tied to agents? Can reputation be maintained? Can positions be safely exposed despite the power they grant competitors?

Explicit positions stifle appreciative, exploratory, connecting conversation. They endanger dignity and agency of people without such positions. They constrain optionality and competitiveness.

But as valid as such concerns are, they aren’t ultimately about the feasibility or desirability of the approach. They are challenges and objections to cohering itself. The dictionary only seeks to advance what cohering communication has always attempted to do. It is as possible, desirable, risky, and separable from conquering and connecting concerns as cohering itself.

Addendum: Tools, Efforts, Resources

Existing tools and efforts help make abstract ideas concrete, offer insights into challenges and possibilities, connect and motivate similarly-minded people, minimize duplication, and encourage action. Although it was tempting to integrate examples into the main text, they don’t all fit neatly and are too likely to become outdated. Instead, I’ve consolidated research on tools and efforts into this addendum which can be separately updated.

I have not yet found tools that make creating dictionary entries obviously worthwhile. But I found many that are tantalizingly close in some respects. And I was delighted to discover a number of projects pursuing broadly similar goals.

At minimum, I want tools to:

Provide a way to link to every node and edge on the graph both from within the graph and outside of it. Basically, each component should have its own url.

Optimized for name and/or type of the component being at most a sentence and often a word with details delegated to linked resources and connections.

Axiom nodes without lower level premises should specify their final justification which may include concepts like axiomatic belief or stipulation or not yet researched along with actual types of evidence.6See Basis Boxes in Rationale argument mapping software for an example.

Yet I couldn’t quite find an obvious hit; each tool I looked at was missing something important. Granted, my search was guided by imprecise intuition rather than a clearly thought-through design. I likely over-optimized for having a single tool that does everything and obliges my preferences. Furthermore, specialized tools require domain knowledge for proper evaluation. Several tools became more promising after I understood them better.

So I would not be surprised if a solution can be assembled from existing tools – or even if a perfect tool already exists – and I just lack the vision or expertise to see it.

Wikis – with their automatic CamelCase linking, backlinks, tagging, and history – are so optimized around modular, interconnected content that I keep trying to find ways to shoehorn wiki software into a solution. They tend to have inadequate support for structuring connections, lack visualization tools, and don’t bias enough against long pages and verbose prose.

TiddlyWiki is a standout exception, with its emphasis on the smallest viable piece of content rather than on a page.8TiddlyWiki also emphasizes being a standalone server-less application which causes more confusion than benefit for our purposes. However, they now support running on a server.TiddlyMap adds connection management and graphical functionality using vis.js. It is a small project with limited ability to link from edges or export though being open source makes these limitations bearable.

There are a number of other argument mapping solutions. Most are academic prototypes for various formal argumentation frameworks. Many are focused on teaching critical thinking. Some were developed especially for argumentative fields like law. They tend to have limited, if any, ability to integrate external content and the argument graph: the argument is the content. Some, like Carneades, offer a window into research on low-level argumentation and the challenges of implementing it. Several, like Argunet and Rationale, have good help sections for understanding argument mapping.

WikiLogic Foundation looks promising, but does not appear to have made much progress lately. Their wiki has a review of other solutions.

It is noteworthy how many efforts are shut down or abandoned. I think the lesson is to prepare for thanklessness and cut scope to something minimally viable. For me, this is being able to record positions in a format that can be exported and improved upon.

A project that stands out for its ambition and perseverance is Cyc. Since 1984 they have been codifying the human web of belief to bootstrap artificial intelligence – substantially by hand. The result looks impressive: a deep knowledge base backed by a comprehensive ontology along with tools for ontology development and inference. It offers great insight into the challenges and possibilities of projects similar to the Dictionary of Arguments and Positions. Cyc is even more ambitious, but it seems likely that their knowledge and tools can be repurposed for dictionary creation.

There are considerable gaps between low-level tools such as those for formal argumentation and knowledge representation and high-level ones like DebateGraph and TheBrain. From my layman perspective, the gaps seem more a result of different specialization than fundamental incompatibility and could be bridged with time. Or perhaps full bridging isn’t necessary for interoperability, much like it isn’t necessary for lower-level software libraries to be written with languages or methods understandable to higher-level users. Perhaps they just need an API.

For example, Deirdre McCloskey brilliantly took the idea of topic sentences to its extreme in Bourgeois Equality. Each chapter is titled with a topic sentence to aid orienting. Furthermore, the sentences are structured such that the table of contents can be read as her argument.

TiddlyWiki also emphasizes being a standalone server-less application which causes more confusion than benefit for our purposes. However, they now support running on a server.

9.

↑

Their design metaphor of a cross-linked forest of individual argument trees is apt, to pick a small example.

]]>https://www.growwiser.com/2018/10/01/dictionary-of-arguments-and-positions/feed/0Cohere, Conquer, Connect: Goals of Communicationhttps://www.growwiser.com/2018/06/29/cohere-conquer-connect-goals-of-communication/
https://www.growwiser.com/2018/06/29/cohere-conquer-connect-goals-of-communication/#commentsFri, 29 Jun 2018 19:07:02 +0000https://www.growwiser.com/?p=409Continue reading Cohere, Conquer, Connect: Goals of Communication→]]>We’ve seen the difficulty of constructing coherent action hierarchies and developing the competence to make them real; the challenges of conveying information to others; and the limitations of convergence – even when these efforts are undertaken with integrity, skill, and energy. Genuine pursuit of truth and improvement is responsible for much progress. Candid communication presupposes their value and seeks to enable their advancement. And most communication at least pretends to strive for truth, coherence, and objective betterment.

But there are at least three motivations to converse. One certainly is to candidly pursue truth and cooperatively converge towards optimal solutions: to cohere. Another is to advance predetermined goals: to conquer. And the last is to engage intellectually, emotionally, or physically with others: to connect.

These motivations are not mutually exclusive: we may hope to connect with others to conquer obstacles towards shared, truth-based, coherent goals and to be recognized for our efforts, contributions, and values. Yet one motivation dominates at any specific time. Even if not deliberately chosen, it biases expectations towards integrity, effectiveness, or kindness at crucial points in the conversation – or redirects towards establishing their importance.

These conflicting motivations add a dimension to misunderstandings and layer jumps that I previously simplified away. It is not enough to get the conversation to a shared part of an action hierarchy and constrain context changes. We need to also converge on, and constrain, the mode of engagement.

Cohere

The goal is truth: to contemplate it, comprehend it, convey it, cohere it, and construct with it. It is an ostensible goal in all communication. The importance of relaying truth, whether of the objective world or of subjective experience, underlies the sacredness of communication and counters the costs of its misuse.

In this mode you steelman interlocutors’ arguments, focus on the weakest part of your argument, and are thankful for revealed flaws. Goals are cooperative, but the process isn’t kind. The priority is to get to the truth. Politeness, modesty, and kindness obscure and misdirect as much as brashness, pride, and selfishness. Manipulation, social pressure, and equivocation are grave dangers. Cohering is brittle to bad faith, sensitivity, fear: it rests on trust in genuine commitment to the truth above everything else.

The essential challenge is to overcome the innate, often subconscious, pull of your own self-interest and emotion as well as to distinguish yourself from ubiquitous conquerors and connectors who also claim a commitment to the truth. The most obvious way to do that is to treat integrity as a matter of honor; to maintain a spotless record of commitment to the truth; to attack even the slightest appearance of manipulation, selfishness, or emotional weakness.

To coherers, these are signs of integrity, honesty, and good faith rather than of meanness, foolishness, incompetence, ignorance, or selfishness. The harder they are to do the more they establish trustworthiness. And not doing them signals prioritization of victory, connection, or comfort over coherence.

If communication could take integrity for granted it would not require displays of either the self-serving or the self-sacrificing variety. The more coherence and truth are advantaged, the closer the conversation can approach effective engagement with model and action hierarchies rather than their shadows. Such idealized environments are the goal of intellectual safe havens, though they can also emerge organically through repeated interactions or be approached temporarily by constraining the conversation.

While pragmatism may initiate or enable such engagements, and emotion may energize or illuminate them, significant portions of them could be done by purely rational robots: dispassionately sharing information, assigning probabilities, deducing possibilities, validating hypotheses. This is as true for topics concerned with external reality such as those in science, engineering, and medicine as for ones concerned with internal state of humans such as those that occupy writers, psychiatrists, and teachers. Keep your identity small. Learn how to disagree. The goal is always to produce the most accurate depiction of reality, neither inhibited nor advantaged unnecessarily by biases, habits, or self-interest.

That such robotic engagement appears impossible or undesirable is a testament to how much of ostensibly cohering communication is devoted to protection from abuse, advancement of agendas, and accommodation of emotional weaknesses. But even in its defensive, constrained, obfuscated forms cohering is still most directly responsible for intellectual and technological progress as it is the only mode that is primarily concerned with objective reality.

Conquer

The conquering approach can involve cordial debate, aggressive attacks, sophisticated rhetoric, emotional appeals, threats, public pressure, coalition building, Overton window shifting, and countless other tactics. The engagement may seek decisive victory or lay the groundwork for a long war. The attacker may appear disinterested and truth-seeking or sympathetic and cooperative or harsh and pragmatic. The strategies and skills may vary, but the goal is always to advance your side. Interlocutors are either enemies to be defeated or raw materials to be manipulated.

Nor does the self-centered, conquering engagement prove the individual corrupt and untrustworthy, or prove the underlying position incoherent or disingenuously supported for profit and convenience. A position developed with utmost care, integrity, altruism, and honesty will still end up in an adversarial competition between groups. Such conflict is an inescapable consequence of impossibility of agreement and engagement in it cannot, by itself, discredit either the person or the position.

Only if the person refuses to grapple honestly with contradictory arguments in the confines of trusted company or their own mind can their integrity be confidently doubted. Only if they choose positions to serve their interests before those interests have evolved from genuinely developed positions can their ethics be legitimately questioned. But such evaluations depend on access to the true amount of effort and an untainted sequence of intentions which cannot survive the conquering mode of engagement.

Positions and goals are inexorably connected, but the direction of causation is inscrutable without trust. Connections will be presented as evidence of integrity and ethics even when causation runs in the opposite direction. And even the truest and best supported sequences of events and intentions will be challenged, obscured, and smeared by competitors. The inevitable connection between positions and actions can usually be framed as honorable or as self-serving.

Conquerors can thus attack the integrity of anyone who enters the battle, no matter their intentions or the care they took to construct or select their positions.

But they can also reliably attack those who don’t enter the battle. They can claim either that the target is a cunning enemy conqueror who has entered the battle subtly or that, while they might have entered it inadvertently, they are nevertheless responsible for how their position empowers despicable enemies. In either case, the target is pressured to rapidly take a position in a war they may have scarcely thought about.

The options are unenviable: they can acquise to a natural desire to disassociate from whatever lowlifes they are being compared to, rebel against being pressured by associating with them, attempt to cohere the original position with however it is being used and misused, or validate the attacks by ignoring them. In all cases, with the framing chosen and timeline forced by conquerors, the clarity and impact of the target’s position are likely to suffer along with their reputation.

In conquering mode truth, empathy, and coherence have no inherent value. They may be necessary to assess situations accurately and attack enemies effectively, but they are tools, not goods. They may be acknowledged as powerful ways to forge alliances and engage energy and loyalty of useful idiots, but their perception will do as well as reality. They may underlie end goals and fundamental beliefs, but those cannot be revealed lest they expose weaknesses. In conquering mode everything is negotiable except effectiveness.

Connect

The goal is a sense of belonging: a feeling of recognition, understanding, worth, care, solidarity. The approach is genuine sharing of beliefs, feelings, concerns, experiences, goals, and fantasies. A connection is formed when there is genuine agreement. But it is also formed when shared content is sympathetically accepted as worthwhile despite potential mistakes, falsehoods, and misinterpretations.

Sharing frequently includes imprecise, emotional, impromptu stream of consciousness. It exposes vulnerabilities. A connection is strengthened when weaknesses are deemphasized while further exploration and engagement are encouraged. Comfort with sharing is an essential component of connecting.

The perception of a genuine connection may be as important as genuineness itself. This could be because the feeling of acceptance has itself grown to paramount importance, as with the comfortable path to happiness. Or it could be because this maintains the connection and thus enables more genuine relationships to develop, truth to illuminate, and agreement to advance.

Manners, interpretations, associations, and tone can thus be more important than content. Judgements, insults, and insensitivity can permanently damage the connection regardless of their defensibility. Conversely, displays of solidarity, concern, and validation can lead to truer, less defensive, more vulnerable communication regardless of their genuineness.

A genuine connection is always preferred, even if it isn’t always required. Truth is important, and often necessary, for connecting. But justification and coherence aren’t. Statements only need to be true in the sense of being genuinely felt. Requests to justify not only withhold validation, but attack the feeling. Even when motivated by connection around better understood beliefs, the willingness to endanger authentic feelings rather than connect around them is off-putting. Neither is a superior way to connect.

Similarly, it is sufficient for coherence to be genuinely felt. Requests to resolve contradictions are as distasteful as requests to justify. Magic is a great enabler of connections. But the importance of consistency doesn’t even need to be accepted. Conflicting premises that are all genuinely felt to be true present no problem for connecting. Inconsistency can be treated as a test of faith, a proof of freedom, an unconquerable reality, a source of connection. It can be seen as evidence of honesty or wisdom rather than of error, deception, or danger. It does not have to strain connections or constrain action.

Uneasy Coexistence

The approaches are interdependent. Each is frequently a prerequisite or a consequence of the others though the conversation partners may be different. Each can be interpreted as goal, strategy, or execution in most action hierarchies by varying the scope despite differences in hierarchies themselves.

Cohering begins with a need to conquer puzzles. These puzzles may concern anything from nature to machines, from social systems to individuals. The search may be motivated by anything from pragmatic necessity to open-ended enablement of progress to satisfaction of curiosity. Execution requires accurate information which is enabled by trustworthy connections and conquered pressures to sacrifice accuracy. Connections are forged with those who find similar puzzles valuable or interesting; those who put truth above pragmatism, kindness, interests, or appearances; and those who endure together.

Conquering begins with a goal found worthy by the standards of coherence or connection. Execution depends on coherent assessment of reality and successful forging of connections. Participation connects with those who share end goals; those who put effectiveness above honesty, kindness, or comfort; and with comrades-in-arms who endure together.

Connecting begins with a desire to understand, or be understood by, another. Genuine connections presume the desire and ability to truthfully assess yourself and others. They depend on an environment that is safe and prosperous enough to be conducive to the process. The connection may be pursued for advantage in competitive endeavors; to advance cooperative pursuits like the search for truth; or simply to maintain an individual sense of purpose, identity, goodness, or sanity that enables action of all sorts.

The three approaches are roughly analogous to dialectic, debate, and dialogue. Real pursuits have each of them somewhere on the critical path. A connection is required to engage truthfully and productively despite conquerors and incompatible ideas. Truth is necessary for genuine connections and effective action. And pragmatic battles are unavoidable, whether they are fought for resources, truth, progress, status, freedom, or belonging. Attempts to blame problems on existence of one of these modes of engagement is naive perfect world building.

Real conversations prioritize each approach as needed. An ideal conversation moves seamlessly between maintenance and development of rapport, truthful assessment of reality and possible actions, and pragmatic engagement to advance past stalemates and secure covered territory. But while an expert leader, or a sufficiently attuned group, may make this process appear natural and continuous, each goal requires a distinct mode of engagement.

Conversing in different modes brings issues similar to discussing different levels of the action hierarchy, but more fundamental and even more debilitating. A conversation on different levels is still ostensibly engaged with the same reality in coherence mode. But this reality scarcely matters in other modes, being merely the means to conquer or the medium through which to connect. If they are not engaged in separately, the discussion will degenerate into talking past each other. Furthermore, each mode makes incompatible assumptions and thus gives ammunition to the others.

This ammunition isn’t equally potent and, if used, will tend to leave conquering as the only viable mode of engagement. When coherers identify irrational connectors or manipulative conquerors, they can only disengage and warn other coherers. When connectors identify uncaring coherers or selfish conquerors, they can only disengage and perhaps unite in righteous anger. But when conquerors identify trusting coherers and naive connectors they can manipulate them forcing attempts, however inept, at defense or retribution in conquering mode.

Legibility for Truth and Manipulation

What is ultimately required for coherence or connection is legibility: an accurate and understandable model of objective reality or subjective beliefs for coherers and of genuinely felt conception of identity for connectors. This goal is advanced by exposing true thoughts and emotions. But it is precisely the lack of such an accurate map of deep beliefs and desires that makes espousing compatible goals, ideas, and behaviors a signal for trustworthiness. The person becomes perfectly manipulatable once such beliefs and desires become known accurately. And once unambiguously exposed, they can never be hidden again.

Aware of the danger of conquerors, coherers and connectors develop an immunological response to them. Politics is the mind killer. Communicate non-violently. Follow the money. But the immune system turns overactive. Anyone who appears incompletely committed to truth or kindness, anyone who has ever had a potential interest or agenda, anyone who seems to have sympathy for competitors becomes a potential conqueror in disguise. It becomes safer and easier to condemn than to engage. Paradoxically, the immune system attacks the most principled and committed allies while empowering conquerors adept at fitting in, defending themselves, and discrediting others. It becomes an enemy of genuineness, independence, competence, and sophistication.

Aware of the reach of conquerors and unreliability of allies, some attempt to protect themselves by approaching truth indirectly. Clarity is replaced by equivocation, deniability, abstraction, complexity. Conversation partners attempt to pass information without committing to it, or at least walk through a maze of reversible statements until trustworthiness seems sufficiently likely. This isn’t merely inefficient, but incredibly difficult. Candidness and clarity are hard even without obfuscation. Few people can create or process equivocal content in a way that still advances towards truth. Few can even see the approach for what it is. And there are no inherent reasons why conquerors can’t be among them.

While candidness and clarity are most effective for approaching truth, they are always risky. They can be encouraged with values and rules that ultimately get enforced, like other absolutes, by guardian conquerors. Or they can be made viable by armies of competing conquerors equal enough in strength to either keep each other sufficiently in check to enable cooperative engagement or create an environment so full of accusations, threats, and noise that those cease to be informative, actionable, or dangerous.

Regardless of what initiates and enables the conversation, it is essential to ascertain whether the unstated goal is to cohere, conquer, or connect; to match it with a compatible mode of engagement; and to remain cognizant of shifts in purpose or approach. Accidental mismatches between the three types of communication are a sure way to talk past each other. Deliberate mismatches are a powerful way to confuse, control, and conquer.

]]>https://www.growwiser.com/2018/06/29/cohere-conquer-connect-goals-of-communication/feed/3Competition Between Persons, Competition Between Groupshttps://www.growwiser.com/2018/02/05/competition-between-persons-competition-between-groups/
https://www.growwiser.com/2018/02/05/competition-between-persons-competition-between-groups/#respondMon, 05 Feb 2018 22:40:47 +0000https://www.growwiser.com/?p=393Continue reading Competition Between Persons, Competition Between Groups→]]>There is a conflict between integrity and effectiveness. An important portion of this conflict cannot be resolved with more sophisticated, longer-term evaluations of effectiveness or with appeals to ways in which integrity bolsters effectiveness. This portion stems from existence of competitive domains indifferent to integrity.

Thoughts of competition tend to bring to mind noble warriors or callous cheats. There are those who pursue agreed upon goals, uphold agreed upon values, follow agreed upon rules, and honorably advance their chosen practice, their community, and themselves. And there are those who just grab what they can get away with. This dichotomy dominates individual experience because competition we encounter tends to have agreed upon goals, values, and rules. Their existence creates a link to integrity.

But there is competition where the only shared understanding is that all will grab what they can get away with. It tends to be the competition to set goals, values, and rules – or to protect them and their enforcers. It increasingly dominates as scope grows and encounters with incompatible positions intensify. It culminates with international relations.

Although this competition is acted out by individuals who may desire integrity and respect the standards of their craft, it isn’t about them. Nor is it won merely through their individual prowess.

The capacity of a group to dispense largesse or inflict pain, its value as a partner, its strength and independence combine with shrewdness of its guardians to enhance its advantage. The importance of such assets percolates to pressure more mundane interactions within the group – and to constrain which internal goals, values, and rules are viable.

But the influence of integrity on member effectiveness and group solidarity also constrains what such pressure can productively accomplish. And internal expectations of integrity put pressure on goals and methods of group’s external competition.

There are two broad types of competition and they interact but conflict. There is competition between persons where integrity matters and there is competition between groups where effectiveness rules.

“…the basic unit of the world economy is not the individual or the firm, but the polity – typically an empire or city-state in premodern times and a nation-state today. Competition or collaboration among countries, rather than among households or companies, is considered to be the central fact of economics…they have viewed the private and public sectors as collaborators in a single national project of maximizing the military security and well-being of the community…while minimizing dependence on other political communities.”

Hamiltonian focus is on the competitiveness and security of the nation while Jeffersonian focus is on the souls of its citizens.

Groups and Nations

The tension between integrity and effectiveness touches everyone from individuals to international organizations. As scale rises, integrity becomes more difficult to define and achieve while violations become easier to hide or excuse. And as stakes rise, more certain, even if shorter-term, effectiveness gains appeal. But even though competition between groups approaches that of nations as scale and stakes grow, competition between nations remains unique.

This uniqueness is rooted in the lack of a higher arbiter to appeal to. When pursuit of effectiveness violates integrity, competitors seek to shun, expel, and punish. And they seek to exemplify, promote, and reward integrity in the face of such temptation. To do this, competitors appeal to rules and norms of their shared group. But membership is layered and actions are constrained by standards of more encompassing groups.

Each surrounding layer brings with it a smaller set of agreed upon principles coupled with stronger powers of judgement and enforcement. These axioms connect groups and empower integrity in their competition. Concurrently, they constrain how groups can define and enforce integrity within their borders because their demands can be escaped or challenged by appealing to rules and norms of higher levels.

But the buck essentially stops at nations. They are the final source of enforceable, shared axioms. They grant our rights and backstop our rules. They are empowered to dole out the harshest punishments and are the final arbiter of disagreements. They are not easily escaped, disobeyed, or ignored. And they aren’t constrained by inviolable norms in competition with other nations.

The final arbiter doesn’t strictly have to be a nation. Lind mentions empires and city-states of the ancient world. Feudal lords, kings, and the church split authority in the middle ages. Multinational corporations, criminal empires, and angry mobs sometimes challenge nations. The future may bring anything from enclaves of Snow Crash and Diamond Age to a world government united in interplanetary competition. What matters is the ability to decide with no further place to run or appeal to.

The influence of integrity depends on the extent to which competitors share norms and are capable of enforcing them. Enforcement ultimately rests on these norms being legitimated by an arbiter. Individual and group competitions under such authority are constrained by integrity. With no such source of authority, competition of nations is dominated by effectiveness.

Individual Integrity

Jeffersonian priority is the nurture of individual virtue and competence. This demands integrity: the compatibility between values, abilities, understanding, and actions. Virtues, capabilities, happiness, and integrity grow in potent interdependence. Their development is significantly endangered by unactionable inconsistency: by violations of integrity that one is expected to accept.

Jeffersonians want to reduce injustice experienced by individuals thereby raising the standards of what is expected, the limits of what is possible, and the perception of what is achievable. Effectiveness, effort, and merit are important, but competition needs to be fair enough for victory to correlate with the virtues. Failure is necessary, but its lessons must be accessible and actionable enough to encourage individual improvement.

Despite their focus on competition between individuals and groups of comparable strength, Jeffersonians aren’t oblivious to the importance of larger groups up through the nation. They just view the quality of individual members to be the most important component of group’s long-term strength. Competent, confident, virtuous people of integrity are the source of ingenuity, vigor, cooperation, and effectiveness. National strength rests on the souls of its citizens.

Organizational Effectiveness

Hamiltonian priority is development of institutions that are strong, resilient, and effective enough to win in amoral competition with other groups. This demands scalability.

Institutions are strengthened not only by highly capable individuals, but also by connecting more plentiful, even if less effective, resources. Such organizing depends on systems and metrics, on solidarity and compliance, on legibility and reliability. It thrives on leverage – whether organizational, financial, or technological.

Hamiltonians want to develop the most powerful sources of leverage at the fastest pace they can. These grant advantages to its institutions that enable diplomatic victories that secure more advantages that aid development of more leverage.

Despite their focus on amoral competition between groups, Hamiltonians aren’t oblivious to the importance of fairness, virtue, and competence of group members. They just view their development as dependent on protective walls of strong and effective institutions. The souls of citizens rest on national strength.

Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians Compared

Jeffersonians evaluate on the micro scale of individuals: how policies affect the individual psyche and incentivize the virtues. Hamiltonians evaluate on the macro scale of organizations: how policies enhance group effectiveness.

Jeffersonians want to optimize, say, bankruptcy policies towards fairness of individual outcomes and consistency with moral prescriptions while Hamiltonians strive to maximize aggregate productive risk-taking. Jeffersonians want large entities to be understandable by concepts and values that apply to the household while Hamiltonians are fine with modeling governments, firms, and individuals independently. Jeffersonians want each to reach their potential and are terrified by dilution of shared virtues while Hamiltonians can tolerate much ineptitude and decadence if aggregate effectiveness can be maintained.

This dichotomy is separate from the left-right political divide. It is different from the distinction I’ve made between the Bright and Free mindsets. And it isn’t irrevocably tied to the specific beliefs of Jefferson or Hamilton. Rather, it is about viewing the world through the eyes of either individuals or institutions.

Guardians, technocrats, and sociopaths live in the Hamiltonian world of institutional effectiveness. Most everyone else lives in the Jeffersonian world of individual integrity. The two worlds depend on and influence, yet invariably underestimate, each other. This seeds failure, though oftentimes isn’t exactly a mistake because the alternatives are comparably problematic.

The world consists of simultaneous competitions at multiple scopes, with conflicting goals, and with no way to constrain all competitors.1For a cogent and fascinating account of how these forces evolve and balance see The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama. The optimal behavior in Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian competitions is so different that neither can deviate much from it without inviting shame or defeat. Yet, their optimizations create vulnerabilities by undermining their interdependent foundations.2Francis Fukuyama explores this interdependence in Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity.

How Jeffersonians Fail

In Two Paths Towards Happiness I presented the alternatives of truth-seeking striving and delusion-friendly comfort. The choice of comfort is an example of extreme Bright Jeffersonianism. Despite being theoretically coherent and achievable, it cannot last.

It focuses exclusively on viability of its peculiar set of virtues within the group. It presumes material abundance. It achieves usefulness by self-referentially placing support of each member’s comfort at its apex – which requires winning uniformity. Victory pushes out those responsible for abundance, but this isn’t a fatal problem: some versions of post-scarcity might not require them. What is fatal, is the unstated assumption of peace.

If the group could maintain stable isolation, then perhaps there are arrangements that would work. But it cannot. No matter how advanced its technology, the world around it will continue to advance. No matter how well its empathetic citizens get along, they have no power over outsiders. If they have something outsiders want, they will be at their mercy.

I am not backtracking on my claim that neither path can be proven unambiguously superior to the other. To rephrase the famous market dictum of John Maynard Keynes3“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”, “The group can remain ignorant longer than you can remain sane.” The path that aligns with society is superior both for the happiness of the individual and for the desires of the group. Even deluded groups can reign for longer than a lifetime – and even failure is unlikely to bring the dissenter validation as it will be blamed on more proximate causes.

Nor does the striving path survive indefinitely despite its more conventional virtues, concern with effectiveness, and connection of usefulness to capacity for objective contribution. Jeffersonian development of virtues and capabilities constrains competition by shunning the profane. When the profane hides a technological or institutional advantage, the virtuous warriors eventually face the unenviable prospects encountered by the likes of the samurai and John Henry. When it engenders sufficient solidarity, even the most virtuous, correct, and effective can fall before the mob.

Nor is turning flexibility, inventiveness, and acceptance of change into virtues a solution. Although it enhances the chance of fighting off obsolescence in the long run, it also increases the probability of periods of weakness in effectiveness or solidarity. A short-term weakness is enough for internal or external competitors to undermine the path. To quote Keynes again, “In the long run we are all dead.”

The source of Jeffersonian strength is in the clarity of what develops individual virtue, competence, and happiness. But the resulting ability to optimize also leads Jeffersonians to disregard their dependence on powerful institutions and innovative heretics. Jeffersonians fail by allowing the competitiveness of their group to deteriorate as they perfect the arena in which group members compete.

How Hamiltonians Fail

To understand Hamiltonian failures, consider metrics and checklists. Metrics are meant to provide an objective, aggregate view into how the institution is doing. Checklists are meant to improve effectiveness by eliminating common mistakes. And as they do indeed enable better management and greater effectiveness, using them would be a clear win if other things could remain equal. Unfortunately, they cannot.

Existence of metrics causes behavior to be optimized for what they measure. Existence of checklists undermines judgment, flexibility, and competence. These effects take time to develop so initial results hide the costs. Even when costs appear, they cannot be conclusively traced to effects on individual psyches rather than on insufficiently tuned metrics and checklists.

Institutions benefit from individual judgement, competence, honesty, and trust, but institutional improvements take them for granted and thus disincentivize their development. Not just in the process of specific improvements, but also as a consequence of success. After all, only the most impressive institutions can make the presumption of peace and abundance seem reasonable enough for comfortable happiness to be promoted en masse.

Nor can institutions avoid these costs without forgoing the benefits and hence ceding advantage to competitors.

The source of Hamiltonian strength is in scalability, but it demands turning individuals into abstractions and losing touch with what makes them function. Hamiltonians fail by diverting competition between individuals to arenas that inadequately support group effectiveness.

Giants, Debt, and Cycles

Groups can thus fail by underestimating external forces. Or by being taken over by internal interests. Or by having a sufficient number of its members lose faith in virtue and integrity. Or by adopting of a system of virtues that discourages competence, effort, and ingenuity.

Jeffersonians are right that virtuous individuals empower groups. Intense perseverance, proud sacrifice, and courageous risk-taking so important for difficult execution depend on absolute belief. Shared goals, values, and norms bind people, lower transaction costs, and enhance effectiveness. Even in environments as ostensibly base and incentive-driven as the capitalist industrial revolution, Deirdre McCloskey’sThe Bourgeois Virtues locates the root of progress in virtuous beliefs.

Yet Hamiltonians are right that strong institutions are necessary to create the relatively unambiguous and fair competitive environments in which virtue can prosper. Without them, virtuous individuals will be overrun by external forces or unscrupulous insiders. Even in a nation as strongly rooted in Jeffersonianism as the United States of America, Michael Lind gives overwhelming credit for progress and success to Hamiltonianism.

Jeffersonians try to keep the differentials in competing powers small enough to allow individuals to understand their world, have meaningful agency, and be able to overpower or escape unscrupulousness. In their desire to curate an environment friendly to development of virtue, they tend to take for granted the lack of external interference. When they are supportive of strong institutions, it is to undermine competitors who have grown too strong or to advance those who have fallen too far behind to exert virtuous agency. Hamiltonian institutions that keep them secure from external threats and provide the internal infrastructure for efficiency and progress are the contemptible giants on whom Jeffersonians stand.

Hamiltonians try to make efficient, interconnected, scalable institutions to allow rapid coordinated response, competence in strategically important areas, and large-scale innovation that continuously develops new advantages in a changing world. In their pursuit of effectiveness, reliability, and growth they tend to take for granted the level of individual energy, ingenuity, honesty, morale, and perseverance. When they take individuals into account at all, it is to incentivize them, locate those with desired skills, or constrain outbursts of the undesirables – all on average. Jeffersonian virtues that grease and fuel their institutions are the contemptible giants on whom Hamiltonians stand.

Although Jeffersonianism and Hamiltonianism are ideologies that deal with nations, their perspectives and tensions apply to groups at all scales. Hamiltonian approaches try to make institutions more efficient, reliable, and scalable while Jeffersonian approaches try to retain their culture, vision, and values.

Hamiltonian improvements debase the currency of virtue one checklist, metric, compromise, abstraction, systemization, or hypocrisy at a time. And abundance created by institutional productivity tempts complacency, entitlement, and mediocracy. These effects, like modest inflation, tend to grow too slowly to appear consequential, but on the scale of generations they suffocate the golden goose of effectiveness and make the group vulnerable to more virtuous barbarians.

Jeffersonian integrity, on the other hand, adds debt to institutions with every forgone opportunity, added inefficiency, or undeveloped capability. And over time, power nevertheless concentrates into virtue-endangering hands that, while less centralized, also have less to fear from efficiency, change, and rule of law. At low levels, integrity seems worth these costs, but over years and decades debt accumulates to make the group increasingly antiquated, slow, and vulnerable to more innovative competitors.

Individuals and institutions work together as do integrity and effectiveness, but they also conflict. They are giants and thus, at any point in time, some portion of what makes them work is taken for granted, treated as contemptible, and undermined. Which leads to cyclical downfalls, each with a terrifying possibility of indefinite collapse.

]]>https://www.growwiser.com/2018/02/05/competition-between-persons-competition-between-groups/feed/0Two Paths Towards Happinesshttps://www.growwiser.com/2017/10/25/two-paths-towards-happiness/
https://www.growwiser.com/2017/10/25/two-paths-towards-happiness/#respondWed, 25 Oct 2017 23:52:42 +0000https://www.growwiser.com/?p=381Continue reading Two Paths Towards Happiness→]]>Underneath every pursuit is a choice. A choice between relishing tasks as a path towards excellence internal to a practice or dispatching them en route to other ends. A choice between seeing challenges as a necessity and opportunity or as an annoyance and expense. A choice between considering burdens as developing and validating the virtues or as interfering with desires and needs.

This choice reveals the extent to which the endeavor is motivated by self-actualization over lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. A pattern of such choices illuminates the significance of self-actualization to the individual.

As different as the lower pursuits of material goods, social belonging, esteem of others, and self-esteem can be from each other, they share a property of having their aim be separate from that of the task being performed – and therefore being in tension with it.

This is easiest to see with material concerns which can be satisfied with explicit dishonesty. Social belonging is only a small step removed: we can cement it with favors that aren’t ours to give. Things get fuzzier with esteem of others: we can gain it by cheating, but this appears to sacrifice the very thing we are being esteemed for. And it seems even stranger to esteem ourselves after cheating.

But recognition by others and belief in our own worth bring benefits as surely as social belonging and material possessions. Cheating doesn’t preclude these benefits because they come from perception of worth rather than from reality.

What makes accuracy important is a separate desire to be a good person with integrity, real worth, and justly earned recognition. Nevertheless, perceived accuracy of such evaluations can assuage even this desire as well as the real thing. Why not achieve excellence by adjusting the standards by which it is measured?

While conscious self-deception is unacceptable to self-esteem and conscious deception risks penalties, we’ve evolved less overt ways to justify, mislead, forget. Among the most insidious and powerful is development of something akin to plausible deniability: a capacity to genuinely deny or excuse inadequacies.

It is influential because it develops naturally unless external forces intervene: simply allow yourself to lower standards. Begin when tasks are small or immaterial enough for your capitulation to be missed or dismissed.

Over time, such self-handicapping both develops the capacity for self-delusion and stunts development of skills, habits, and preferences necessary to act persistently, advance competently, evaluate objectively. Performance truly seems unimprovable and failures unavoidable.

Only at self-actualization does truth become indispensable and our aims become inseparable from the task: self-actualization demands reaching our potential, not merely feeling like we did. Achievement of lower levels of the hierarchy at its expense is an affront. Self-esteem and recognition only matter when they are compatible with the pursuit.

Self-actualization seems rewarding, honorable, authentic. But its pursuit proves unexpectedly uncertain, difficult, and dangerous. Dangerous not just materially or physically, but emotionally. Because hiding underneath it is ultimately a choice between being happy and being right – a choice that isn’t obviously inescapable until it is too late to choose happiness.

You Can Be Happy or You Can Be Right

How can pursuits as noble and desirable as those of potential and truth conflict with happiness? Haven’t we experienced the joys of accomplishment and understanding along with the hardships of incompetence and ignorance? Doesn’t Maslow’s hierarchy deem self-actualization the highest need and a gateway to ultimate happiness?

Happiness and rightness are indeed compatible, even complimentary, but only while truth appears objective and valued. Since there are limits beyond which even truths rests on faith, we need communal reinforcement to make this faith seem indisputable. Communal values and structures help us develop and retain the absolute belief we need to progress through Maslow’s hierarchy without sacrificing rightness, to perform at our peak and be happy.

The impossibility of universal agreement confines communal endorsement of truth while truth-seeking skills, habits, and preferences conflict with the ability to restrict the search to arbitrary bounds. Even if we want to stop, our capacity for self-delusion grows insufficient to suppress knowledge and capabilities without unhappiness.

Historically, the borders of acceptable rightness – beyond which heroes became lunatics or heretics – have been sufficiently remote to keep rightness on the communal pedestal. And those who crossed them could envision themselves as prophets suffering to bring objective truths to the unenlightened. But when limitations of truth and subjectivity of communal values approached common knowledge, the remote, theoretical tension with happiness entered everyday experience.

It is when we realize that people and communities can, and do, choose to be happy over being right proudly and deliberately, that we recognize that vindication or recognition might not accompany the choice of rightness; that conflict, loneliness, and unhappiness may be permanent companions.1The choice to be right is the choice to build a coherent action hierarchy from first principles.

Truth is an essential component of striving for excellence, but it brings us in conflict with others and eventually leads us to an abyss demanding faith. It thus erodes the same factual foundations and social validation to which it ties our identity and happiness.

Why not instead strive for happiness and back it with faith from the beginning? Why not embrace development of plausible deniability in search of comfort? Why treat the striving, rightness-seeking path as superior to the comfortable, happiness-seeking path? Perhaps “where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.”

There are three broad defenses. We can claim that striving is necessary for flourishing: that the comfortable path is self-defeating. We can claim that striving provides the goods necessary for happiness: that the comfortable path is unsustainable. Finally, we can claim that the striving path contributes more to the community: that the comfortable path is unfair. None of them are unassailable.

Happy as a Pig

“It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.”

Mill pits happiness against striving and sides with striving because it is more right: the happiness achieved at its expense is of an inferior kind. His intuition feels correct. Being compared to a pig or a fool feels insulting.

“In what then consists human wisdom or the road of true happiness? It is not precisely in diminishing our desires…neither is it in extending our faculties…But it is in diminishing the excess of the desires over the faculties and putting power and will in perfect equality.”

Striving is a mistake for Rousseau, but is essential for Mill. Rousseau elaborates:

“It is imagination which extends for us the measure of the possible…but the object [of this desire] flees more quickly than it can be pursued…No longer seeing the country we have already crossed, we count it for nothing…The real world has its limits; the imaginary world is infinite. Unable to enlarge the one, let us restrict the other, for it is from the difference between the two alone that are born all the pains which make us truly unhappy…”

Yet it is precisely the workings of imagination that produce the higher pleasures that distinguish a human from a pig.

Rousseau isn’t advocating for hedonism, idleness, or ignorance: on the contrary, he preaches simplicity, self-sufficiency, resilience, and competence. The equilibrium on which desires and faculties ought to converge isn’t arbitrary: it must be set by natural necessity. Rousseau’s striving is more limited and concrete because his happiness is closer to nature. But it still has higher and lower forms.

Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism whose framework greatly influenced Mill, approaches Mill’s antithesis by rejecting qualitative distinctions between types of happiness. For Bentham, all happiness is measurable in interchangeable units of pleasure and pain – with ostensible contradictions explainable by a sufficiently comprehensive calculation. Flourishing is the maximization of these units of happiness.2A strictly quantitative view was not an oversight. Alasdair MacIntyre, among others, have argued that Mill’s attempt to correct Bentham’s ostensible mistake decohered utilitarianism.

This simplification of flourishing to happiness followed by reduction of happiness to a single value, equates the happiness of a human and a pig. It feels wrong, but is the mistake with the equivalence or with feeling perturbed by it?

The subject of happiness and its relationship to striving for truth, greatness, or virtue has occupied thinkers for thousands of years.3Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics remains deeply relevant and thought provoking. SEP’s wonderful interpretive summary is well worth the time. Underneath every theory is a conception of what it means to be human intertwined with a telos: a human or communal purpose. Goals are judged on their compatibility with the telos. Paths are compared based on completeness of individual’s achievement: how fully they reach their potential or how perfectly they adhere to communal expectations.

Happiness achieved by giving up one’s telos would indeed be impermanent, incomplete, or inferior. The insult in being compared to a pig is in the accusation of settling for less than is one’s nature. But how do we justify angst with being equated to a pig after rejecting teleologies that establish uniquely human apogees?

Perhaps we still believe in thresholds: gradations of consciousness, or complexity, or ability to feel pain, or empathy, or peacefulness. But the relevance of even such minimal standards is difficult to defend without a teleology. Or perhaps we believe in leaving each individual free to define their own telos while only judging the quality of their execution: how close they come to optimal long-term happiness by their own metrics. But this only encourages easiest goals: the happiness of pigs and fools.

Perhaps instead our dissatisfaction is merely a remnant of being molded to an outdated teleology – or a consequence of not being molded enough to overcome outdated natural inclinations. Perhaps failures of comfortable happiness come from accusations of inferiority rather than from inferiority itself. Perhaps if our children grow up in a sufficiently enlightened society, then they can be happy as pigs without unease.

Means

Even if we accept commensurability of different types of happiness, there remains the challenge of acquiring goods necessary for them. Even the simplest pleasures have requirements that aren’t pleasant to fulfill. Perhaps higher pleasures aren’t the end, but the means: an illusion that helps us meet such requirements with greater effectiveness and pleasure.

Or perhaps higher pursuits encourage pleasures over which we have more control thus protecting us from unhappiness. They are a more effective means to maximize aggregate pleasure over a lifetime of possible circumstances rather than a higher end in themselves.

But if modernity allows us to satisfy material requirements with increasingly less sophistication, skill, and displeasure – or with sophistication and pleasure in wildly different skills – then shouldn’t we drop the pretense? And if it grants us greater control over circumstances, then shouldn’t an expanded variety of pleasures now maximize our probabilistic aggregate happiness? Perhaps if our children grow up in a society that is not only enlightened, but sufficiently prosperous, then they can finally wallow unabashedly in carefree happiness of their choosing.

Usefulness

Without a definitive standard of human telos there is no way to rank individuals as human beings and hence no way to rank happiness of differing sophistication. But individuals are also members of communities and can still be ranked by their level of usefulness to the group.

Since usefulness is good almost by definition, individuals feel ennobled in pursuing it and justified in recognizing its pursuits by others. And since it is beneficial to society, it is encouraged with rewards, status, and other benefits which make its pursuit desirable aside from loftier considerations. As long as societal goals are accepted as justified, these conditions engender a telos of usefulness and create structures to encourage its development.

So even if comfortable happiness is individually preferable, its acceptability is tempered by lower communal usefulness. And even if the individual can fulfill the immediate requirements of such happiness, they remain indebted to those who made the task as easy as it was. They need to do much more to do their fair share.

But individual sense of fairness, evaluation of usefulness, and awareness of dependencies rely on the sophistication of individual understanding which brings back insidious incentives to develop plausible deniability.

Usefulness is more measurable and directly beneficial to others than individual flourishing which encourages external forces that curtail plausible deniability. But modernity makes it feasible to escape these forces by changing communities when they become inconvenient. And as progress engenders complex societies with a multitude of highly visible tasks reliant upon increasingly invisible foundations, opinions of usefulness shift from creation towards compassion. Deniability is empowered as conceptions of goodness, purpose, and flourishing shift away from prowess and accuracy towards pleasure and kindness.

But if technologically advanced societies make value creation so abstract as to become inaccessible to most people, and so efficient as to make it unnecessary for most to contribute, then perhaps redistribution and emotional support are most useful. Perhaps if our children grow up in a society advanced and progressive enough for kindness to be the highest good, then they can feel useful and happy in comfort.

Interdependence

The considerations of nature, means, and usefulness are interconnected as are the concerns of individuals and community. Usefulness encourages perseverance when teleological faith wanes. Means offer short-term incentives, set minimum standards of usefulness, validate attainment of competence. Community provides context in which skills and values necessary for flourishing are developed and exercised. Individual flourishing, in turn, helps justify the community, encourages perseverance when faith in usefulness is shaken, drives action when nothing has to be done.

Such interconnections allow for lack of necessary labor to be celebrated as the means towards human flourishing, for the lack of immediate contributions to be seen as an investment. If human nature won’t be satisfied with aimlessness or idleness, then endeavors of ostensibly questionable usefulness can be justified as probabilistically useful exploration; or as fostering the capacity to contribute; or as inspirational exemplifications of human virtues through teleological striving.

Interconnections also help balance the variety in circumstances. Difficulties, misfortune, failure, and unfairness may hinder opportunities to contribute, but offer opportunities to develop, showcase, and take pride in the virtues of character. Those who accomplish with comparative ease can take pride in the superiority of their contributions, yet feel inferior to those who had the opportunity to rise to a greater challenge.

Interconnections rest on a shared conception of the human telos, a shared recognition of the value of communal goals, a shared understanding that individual flourishing aids the community while also being dependent on it.

Nature, means, and usefulness make a stronger, though more magical, argument together than apart, but they can be united under the contented telos just as they can under an aspirational one. The most sophisticated, striving life can’t be proven unconditionally better than a blissfully comfortable, pleasant one.

Two Paths

Both approaches have strong preferences about the external world: conditions they need to survive and flourish, conditions they strengthen by existing and expanding.

In both approaches, happiness requires that we be a good person with integrity, worth, and recognition. In the comfortable view, we gravitate towards convenient definitions, measure against internal difficulties, seek corroborating evidence and social support: we focus on self-enhancement. In the striving view, we desire accurate definitions, measure against external possibilities, seek cogent objections: we focus on self-assessment.

In both approaches, we develop abilities and expectations through thousands of choices and experiences over years of interaction with people, activities, and incentives. In the comfortable view, we want society to protect us from cognitive dissonance: to validate our self-perception, to provide sufficient resources, to disavow judgement, to ask that we not make others feel inferior. In the striving view, we want society to help us reach our potential: to validate greatness, to encourage responsibility, to judge and reward objectively, to ask that we improve ourselves and aid improvement of others.

The difficult part of blissful happiness is management of arguments and empirical evidence that challenge our self-assessment. Impressive deeds and noble goals need to be demoted: explained away as eccentric preferences, or fortunate circumstances, or manifestations of narcissism, or dangerous mistakes, or exaggerations and delusions. Simultaneously, plausible deniability needs to be supported: uniqueness validated, justifications accepted, achievements equated, emotions elevated.

The difficult part of striving is arduousness. Temptations of comfort, pleasure, and satisfaction unhinged from accomplishment need to be demoted: framed as weakness, or baseness, or self-deception, or free-riding. Simultaneously, desire and ability to achieve needs to be supported: noble goals validated, excuses challenged, effort and sacrifice glorified, impressive deeds honored.

The approaches conflict. Examples of heroism, sacrifice, perseverance, and accomplishment inspire, but expose gradations of worth. Improved abilities develop objectivity and effectiveness, but challenge the edifice of plausible deniability. It isn’t that there are no nice, effective ways of combining a variety of preferences, capabilities, and achievement levels: societies have always combined them. It is that every workable combination proceeds from choosing either happiness or striving as superior.

The blissfully happy can dignify the strivers as pursuing unique interests, doing useful work, and being good people – just not as pursuing better interests, doing more useful work, and being better people. Unfortunately, such dignity is woefully insufficient to justify the sacrifices necessary for excellence. The strivers can empathize with the carefree as immature, unfortunate, or decent fellow beings – just not as equally aware, useful, or honorable ones. Unfortunately, such ranked empathy is too harsh to protect blissful happiness. One side or the other must accept a lower ranking or work against societal forces.

Each path carries trade-offs. If we choose to rate humans above pigs, then we also choose to rate humans beings. Such ranking exposes us to the meanness of judgement, the distress of failure, the risk and hardship of effort, the insatiability of striving, and the fear of inadequacy. On the other hand, if we choose comfort, then we also choose to suppress truth and striving, to encourage illusions and excuses. Such focus exposes us to fragility.

Neither path can be conclusively defended. And each path brings with it a cascade of values, trade-offs, and action hierarchies that strive to re-enforce itself or dismantle the other; that strive to enable development of plausible deniability or to suppress it; that strive to be happy or to be right.

]]>https://www.growwiser.com/2017/10/25/two-paths-towards-happiness/feed/0On the Shoulders of Contemptible Giantshttps://www.growwiser.com/2017/08/15/on-the-shoulders-of-contemptible-giants/
https://www.growwiser.com/2017/08/15/on-the-shoulders-of-contemptible-giants/#respondWed, 16 Aug 2017 01:25:23 +0000https://www.growwiser.com/?p=352Continue reading On the Shoulders of Contemptible Giants→]]>The metaphor of dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants sought to reconcile the magnitude of past greats with the ability of successors to move beyond their accomplishments. It had moderns bow gratefully before past prowess and meekly acknowledge their indebtedness. Yet it also had them boldly assert their usefulness and worth by standards shared with the ancients.

Today, we seem more inclined to perceive ourselves as wading through predecessors’ trash than as riding on their shoulders. We question the stature and agency of giants, doubt their ethics, and blame them for our ills.

We see ugliness, flaws, constraints. We see how they encourage draining, suboptimal, desperate, unethical behavior. We see how more care, thought, effort, or sacrifice by our predecessors could have avoided these problems. We conclude that instead of hoisting us on their shoulders, they pushed us into the muck.

We neglect that progress carries costs, action brings mistakes, choices have trade-offs, and hindsight arouses certitude. Being hoisted higher makes new costs, errors, imperfections, challenges, and possibilities easier to see while allowing old ones to fade from view.

Illusion of Free Lunch

Paradoxically, the more benefits we receive the more objectionable we find the newly apparent costs. The higher we rise above the swampy, thorny, muggy, dangerous reality the more we complain about mud splashes, branch whips, sunburn, motion sickness. Like overindulged children, we find ever-smaller imperfections ever-more upsetting. Like overprotected children, we underestimate the difficulties, pains, and problems that have been taken care of.

We don’t appreciate what we have because we don’t understand what it took to gain it, the challenges of life without it, or the difficulties of making it work. We don’t understand because we don’t need to: the most pressing, painful, and limiting problems of the past have been handled so well that we can disregard them. And since those problems used to be so consuming and constraining, we have more disposable time, energy, and resources to be dissatisfied with issues that remain. The higher we are hoisted the more flaws we see.

This dissatisfaction is not itself a problem: progress rests on it. Nor is criticism itself a problem: insight demands it.

The problem is with naivety of dissatisfaction and ingratitude of criticism. These engender a hubristic illusion of free lunch: the disregard of trade-offs and costs; the taking for granted of benefits and dependencies; the replacement of obligations and complexities with expectations and priceless values; the belief in improvement without limit or loss. Consequently, expertise is discounted, foundations dismantled, banal problems developed, and perfect worlds demanded.

These consequences – like spoiled children – are rarely sought explicitly. They emerge from well-intentioned, innocuous, often cute requests: each small or reasonable enough to make resistance seem disproportionately expensive, harsh, or petty – yet each building on the rest. Individual naivety and societal capacity ease acquiescence to requests while success reinforces requestors’ feelings of confidence and superiority inducing increasingly simplistic, yet stubborn, demands.

This illusion of competence doesn’t just fuel attacks on what is, but makes the instigators ill-prepared to handle the consequences or build replacements. Unaccustomed to requisite complexities, trade-offs, and hardships they are quick to overestimate the difficulty or singularity of circumstances, prone to disillusionment or extremism.

Illusions don’t need to be complete and denial of trade-offs doesn’t need to be total any more than belief in free lunch needs to be literal: trade-offs just need to be undervalued sufficiently to enable confident mistakes. The good life inadvertently facilitates and empowers this undervaluation.

Contribution of Giants

The beginning of a giant’s journey is distinguished by a certain closeness to reality. Nascent giants may be naive idealists – as is common with inventors – or grizzled realists – like the signers of the Peace of Westphalia. They may rise out of inspiration, or necessity, or accident. But whatever else they are, they interact with something that is raw and true – even if only in part and by mistake.

They become giants by domesticating this raw reality. Insights reveal hidden patterns. Effort and exploration uncover simpler paths through complexity. Expertise produces systems. Mysterious, dangerous, difficult, and unpredictable reality becomes encapsulated into neater, tamer, simpler, and more compliant abstractions. These get built upon to breed still more docile successors.

Effectiveness and accessibility of abstractions skyrocket potential for productivity and delight. Life changes for the better. But as earlier challenges become less relevant, understanding of them fades and skills to deal with them atrophy. Difficulty and contingency of abstractions’ creation gets increasingly underestimated or forgotten. Assumptions on which ostensibly tamed abstractions depend cease to be widely understood or believed.

Newcomers do not need such knowledge or skills – or even the capacity or interest to develop them – to act confidently and effectively. Democratization of capabilities has lowered the requisite sophistication and diminished the necessity of experts. Powers that took centuries of exploration and innovation to develop and significant insight, finesse, and toil to use have become accessible with scarcely a thought.

Most continue to recognize how good they have it. Many still want to be good citizens: to trust in rules and traditions even if they don’t understand them. Giants and their disciples retain a towering presence. Things seem to only improve.

But as gains grow ubiquitous, gratitude to predecessors and connection to the past begins to fade. Awareness of risks and sense of obligation declines. Ferocious wilderness increasingly feels exaggerated. Perception of capabilities shifts from luxury towards necessity; from privilege towards entitlement.

The voice of the community becomes increasingly overwhelmed by those who take the capabilities for granted. Focus changes from how wonderful and accessible these capabilities are to how they are flawed, underutilized, or insufficiently widespread. Some motivated individuals attempt to fix flaws; others build on the capabilities or expand their applicability; still others work to increase accessibility and decrease inequity or abuse.

Such efforts have always existed, but were constrained by the small number of participants, lackluster availability of resources and recognition, influence of giants, and understanding of complexity. Popularity has added the resources and rewards while removing the shackles of tradition, caution, and knowledge.

Contempt for Giants

New efforts intimately depend on the underlying capabilities. They appear doable only because those capabilities work well. They appear important only because those foundations can be taken for granted. But since the foundations work well enough to be taken for granted, their dependencies and trade-offs are no longer taken seriously. The foundations appear as progress gained with no possibility of permanent retreat: as products of time more than of effort or ingenuity.

Improvements, extensions, and accessibility take precedence over the capabilities themselves. Adverse effects of these efforts on the foundations are downplayed or considered to be worth the benefits. Since such consequences rarely manifest with clarity and immediacy, they only get taken less seriously with time. Those who point out such dangers and connections get increasingly dismissed as old-fashioned or risk averse – and, in any case, as holders of just another opinion. New efforts are what matters now.

Proposals appear to rebuild the capabilities on modern foundations, to stop worrying about abstract risks and focus on real suffering they can alleviate today. The illusion of free lunch makes better worlds – even perfect worlds – seem more accessible than ever. Since it seems inexcusable to prevent or delay progress towards them, those who object become more likely to be seen as ignorant or immoral.

Re-examination of giants from the vantage point of modern norms and powers reveals contributions that seem unimpressive; beliefs that seem crude, unethical, or mistaken; and trade-offs that seem unnecessary and cruel. This cements the suspicion that past considerations should be disregarded: that their creators confused fortune for wisdom and are, in fact, more worthy of contempt for the carelessness of their mistakes and the depth of their ethical transgressions than of revelry for their accomplishments.

Cycle of Trade-Offs

Unfortunately, solutions rarely provide generic, permanent progress. Instead, they make trade-offs to achieve specific results under specific conditions. Many of the conditions appear too obvious to mention and many of the trade-offs seem like no-brainers at the time. Some are consciously considered and chosen. But whether implicit or explicit, they constitute the reality within which each solution functions. It is the impact of changes on this reality that concerns those who concretely understand how the solution works.

Reformers are abstracted from this reality, thanks to the solution itself. As a result, they are quick to misdiagnose manifestations of solution’s costs and dependencies as problems of paramount importance. Because they see independent problems instead of trade-offs, they seek one-sided optimizations and find simple, even obvious, solutions.

They secure quick gains that validate the approach as somewhere between genuine wisdom and necessary expedience. Concurrently, expedience gains in stature and influence due to rapid progress and lack of obvious costs. But despite appearances, these gains come less from correctness or cleverness and more from risk-taking and free-riding. They use up goodwill, add debt, increase fragility, decohere systems, and resurrect previously conquered costs, but such downsides emerge slowly and sporadically. By the time they hit in earnest, the connection to expedience becomes just one nebulous explanation among many.

With time, it is the gains of reformers that become increasingly taken for granted, while costs and dependencies grow salient. Reformers notice that these issues cannot be solved without undermining the solutions they fought for; they may even glimpse their resemblance to benefits they earlier took for granted. This recognition of complexity and necessity of trade-offs drives most reformers to denial, disillusionment, or desperation – and a few to wisdom. But newcomers are already confidently treating new problems as independent, paramount issues of the age.

This cycle of flipping priorities, driven by the illusion of free lunch, underlies the rise and fall of groups, the tension between generations, the conflict between upstarts and establishment, and the evolution of winners’ priorities to resemble those they replaced. It is visible in history of politics, economics, and ideas; in sources of competitiveness and goodness; in models of individuals, technologies, organizations, and nations.

It is everywhere because giants aren’t just individuals. Values, groups, systems, discoveries, tools, peace, prosperity – anything that abstracts away complexity – has the stature of giants, even when closer inspection reveals a tower of dwarfs. They grant us powerful capabilities, but only as part of a system with dependencies and trade-offs.

But as soon as we get comfortable on giant’s shoulders, we begin to forget that we ride atop abstractions optimized around specific assumptions, goals, and constraints. And the better the system works, the less these abstractions leak and the more we take them for granted. Or empower those who undervalue their good fortune. Or find ourselves unable to thwart their advance.

This is natural and understandable. We cannot viscerally appreciate the entire pyramid of improvements in perpetuity: we must treat parts of it as magic and thus be increasingly defined by most tangible concerns.

The concrete challenges and rewards we encounter drive development of our individual models, values, skills, and goals which in turn affect communal visions, expectations, capabilities, and projects which then influence individual challenges and incentives.

Adopting magic exposes us to mistakes, but we cannot eschew it without giving up action. Nor can we sacralize magic to avoid errors: we’d merely cement earlier mistakes or be invalidated by the changing world.

Although the cycle of trade-offs destroys and reinvents, it also corrects and rejuvenates. It takes steps back, but enables leaps forward by energizing passions, growing our toolkit, and forcing re-evaluations that – akin to simulated annealing – help us out of local minima. Zooming out from cyclical booms and busts we may find impressive progress – though our joy must remain tempered by eerie uncertainty about its costs, dependencies, and trade-offs.

We may even wish to accelerate the cycle to speed up innovation. Naivety and hubris encourage nascent giants to experiment and create. Engagement with readily observable problems grows opportunities and understanding. Innovation compounds to provide options that weren’t possible in the past – and thus validates itself by giving hope for options that aren’t available in the present. We could reasonably gamble that this type of greedyexploratory strategy will yield solutions faster than it creates problems.

Or we can try to slow down the cycle by working harder to understand before we act, by giving tradition more weight in times of uncertainty, by assuming that there is always a cost.

We can’t hope to eliminate the cycle: to stamp out the momentum of systems or the influence of forgetfulness and hubris. But conscious attempts to accelerate or moderate it are possible and defensible. Greater appreciation of giants is appropriate. Better understanding of context is desirable. The viability of such goals depends, in part, on awareness of the cycle itself.

Visibility of Complexity

For most of history individuals were only exposed to large shifts in expectations or perspective a few times in their lives. The past was distant and inaccessible enough that we were doomed to repeat it. But modern technology has made such shifts increasingly common.

Today’s customers are more likely to also own, found, or run organizations. Today’s buyers are more likely to also sell. Today’s audiences are more likely to also perform, opine, create, or share publicly. Today’s users are more likely to also build. Today’s preachers are more likely to also be judged.

Meanwhile, life cycles of standards, technologies, projects, and ideas have shrunk to years and have become numerous and easy to follow. They seem to have a predictable path: accomplishments and their creators progress from being considered irrelevant or delusional to extraordinary to expected to faulty to lucky or wicked. Their fates showcase the fickle nature of entitled forgetfulness and its consequences.

Whether by experiencing the conflicting priorities of both sides; by riding the roller-coaster of endeavors from dream to disillusionment; by helplessly watching our world be disrupted; by having our certainties challenged in the pluralistic arena; or by seeing our words and deeds rapidly reinterpreted and propagated we are continuously exposed to the illusion of free lunch, the contributions and dismissal of giants, the cycles of flipping trade-offs.

This growing exposure to change, complexity, diversity and to consequent oversimplifications leading to flipping priorities gives us the opportunity and imperative to appreciate what we have and recognize what we owe; to be less inclined to find doers contemptible and be weary of visions of free lunch; to elevate our understanding and adjust our expectations; to choose our trade-offs and engage the cycle more deliberately.

]]>https://www.growwiser.com/2017/08/15/on-the-shoulders-of-contemptible-giants/feed/0Laws of Absolute Belief and Pluralityhttps://www.growwiser.com/2017/03/01/laws-of-absolute-belief-and-plurality/
https://www.growwiser.com/2017/03/01/laws-of-absolute-belief-and-plurality/#respondWed, 01 Mar 2017 15:18:23 +0000https://www.growwiser.com/?p=316Continue reading Laws of Absolute Belief and Plurality→]]>There is an incredible diversity of positions and arguments. But underneath this variety are comparatively few causes, many of which rest on disagreement over fundamental concepts like good, right, and happy. Contemporary arguments are overwhelmingly instantiations of ancient disagreements in the sense that both would cease if such concepts were genuinely agreed upon.

Although all necessary disagreements terminate in conflicting axioms, passionate disagreements endure when several sets of such axioms are valuable despite being incompatible. The worth of essential systems, validated by empirical effectiveness and grounded in coherent positions that reduce to these axiom sets, impassion argument. Justifications grow in sophistication, but remain in tension because they point to irreconcilable truths.

Over the last eight posts I attempted to illuminate the most fundamental of such tensions; a tension I find latent in most arguments that, as long as it remains latent, reduces them to minor acts of refinement rather than advancement – in those rare cases when they rise above propaganda or derp. This is the tension about the inevitability of tension itself.

My argument consists of two substantially independent tracts which represent two sides of this tension: one that argues for the value of absolutes and another that argues for the limits to agreement on them. I have come to view both of these positions as axiomatic to the point that I am willing to call them laws:

Law of Absolute Belief: “Purpose and effectiveness rest on absolute belief.”

And:

Law of Plurality: “Universal agreement on absolutes is impossible.”

These seemingly paradoxical laws have disturbing implications and I did not come easily to their acceptance. But now that I have accepted them, I am not easily compelled to engage propositions that question them. Yet such propositions are ubiquitous. A major motivation for this series was to justify my reluctance to argue past a violation of these laws.

Broadly On Breadth

Along the way I develop, state, or hint at models of expansive concepts like action, learning, meaning, effectiveness, and communication. I do this at a level of abstraction that I expect many to find trite, uncomfortable, or incomprehensible. Many of the reasons for this amount to my personal limitations or preferences, but some are important to the argument itself.

I was not led to diverse domains by fancy. On the contrary, I have tried to make my point with fewest parts. But that arguments stand on acceptance – frequently implicit – of a multiplicity of models spanning diverse fields is itself a major part of my argument. It takes many words to explicitly lay out what those positions are, how they are connected, and why they are necessary – even if one treats them as axiomatic backstops rather than attempting to prove them.

It could be justifiably demanded that I concretely defend my hand-wavy statements. Which would take a carefully written book for nearly every paragraph and for many of the sentences. Fortunately, I can also justifiably deny this request because such books already exist. There are rich intellectual traditions that defend and criticize every element of what I unabashedly state. My reading page will get you started as would a tour of philosophy. But these conflicting traditions are all Pandora’s boxes of evermore refined arguments and connections.

Persistent attempts to follow justifications to reconciliation or truth are what led me to write this series. Being more concrete will not provide certainty; it will instead change the topic towards a survey of intellectual traditions or, perhaps, a contribution to one of them. Which are fine goals, but not the ones I am pursuing. And it risks misrepresenting sophisticated positions or activating preconceptions of them.

I am fairly confident that, with some allowance for my limitations as a writer, the positions I presented can be defended, but I do not claim that they can be proven. Such a proof would violate the Law of Plurality.

Value of Absolutes

In Significance of Agreement I unpack the reasons we seek agreement. In the process, I show how absolute belief permeates existence; how essential it is to society and individuals; how it is discounted only because it is taken for granted. Agreement – and absolute beliefs on which it usually rests – validate our collective goals, standards, ethics, and assumptions; power the effectiveness of our efforts; and underlie our individual sense of meaning and worth.

In Ingredients of Action I develop a psychological model of action that showcases the importance of clarity – a consequence of absolute belief. I connect perseverance to properties of identity, faith in vision, and their congruence with action. I show how individual capabilities, vision, and identity evolve from consequences of action itself; how such action is inexorably connected to communal projects; how acceptance of this connection is predicated on the perceived truth and goodness of communal visions; and how this perception is validated by communal effectiveness, integrity, and fairness. I thus detail the connection of societal agreement and effectiveness to individual identity; and of absolute beliefs – on which identity rests – to individual motivation, effectiveness, ethics, and purpose.

In Emergence of Identity and Belief I trace the evolution of these relationships back to in utero, through an inductive, pride-centered model of child development. I demonstrate how absolute belief underlies everything from learning, fairness, and goodness to our will to act.

Absolute belief is a vital, innate, and powerful part of human psychology. We evolved with a predisposition to perceive truth, structure, and purpose. We evolved to live in small groups that shared high-level axioms, models, goals, and strategies. Life in these closed, tight-knit, stable communities naturally reinforced shared beliefs and goals. Connections established in childhood transferred well to adult life. Individual and communal lives were sufficiently in sync to affirm reliability of communal models.

The idea of a single trustworthy answer is woven deeply into our nature, culture, and institutions. Over time, we have moved to larger, less cohesive, and more impersonal communities; we have encouraged openness and movement; we have disempowered norm-enforcing institutions and ideas. But we still assume that our values and goals are grounded in absolutes.

Inevitability of Plurality

Confidence in such values and goals, and their connection to our identity, encourages us to contribute, pursue recognition, prove goodness, and seek meaning on the communal stage – a stage that is increasingly global. The conviction in preeminence of models and strategies based on correct principles biases our efforts towards theory and agreement.

In Perfect Worlds and Their Limits I describe how this idealism leads the charge to improve the world, but faces unresolvable challenges to acceptance of its theoretically coherent blank-slate strategies – as well as limitations to the validity and usefulness of principles and theories themselves.

In Banality of Problems and the Limits of Scalability I detail how pragmatic realities and everyday trivialities permeate and derail execution of even the simplest tasks with ostensibly obvious goals, models, and strategies. I trace how attempts to root-cause and subdue these difficulties face unresolvable challenges. And I show what underlies high-quality, effective execution and why even its rare examples are limited in scale, scope, and permanence – and are thus inadequate for universal aspirations.

The challenges and limitations of both theory and practice lead to failures across scopes. Thinkers and doers oftentimes condescendingly feel that obvious mistakes of the other are responsible for delays, costs, and failures while their own astute and steadfast efforts under resulting difficult conditions are inadequately recognized. Even when such disputes rise above reductionist questioning of specific decisions – never mind of ethics, competence, or commitment – they rarely escape friction over the comparative merits of strategy and execution, explicit and implicit knowledge, coherence and pragmatism. But success and failure are both possible with most combinations of these.

In Anatomy of Action and Understanding I present a fundamental model of action. I trace development of capabilities, goals, strategies, and models; show their frequent gaps and conflicts; and describe the difficulties of constraints, feedback, and integration. The model sheds light on the indispensable value of both coordinated theoretical coherence and effective practical fingerspitzengefühl as well as on the reasons why they are so rare and challenging to scale.

With this model in place, I revisit the pursuit of effectiveness and improvement in Magic and the Challenge of Action. I begin with resistance to change that frustrates optimists and demands an infuriating amount of their attention. I root this resistance in abstraction, faith, and habits that result from the complex and incomplete nature of action hierarchies.

I show that attempts to remove such magic are misguided because it offers powerful and indispensable benefits. Furthermore, hopes of eliminating just its worst types are only a bit less naive because the types are difficult to tell apart, all magic is deeply woven in, and we have evolved strong defenses for magic as such.

I then switch focus to implementation. Most idealists pin their hopes for progress on communication leading to convergence. I use action hierarchies and magic to show why this is untenable.

I then dig deeper to the fundamental assumptions that underlie such hopes: the possession of a superior, complete, and coherent action hierarchy and the ability of teach it. I show that while such hierarchies are indeed extremely powerful, they are preciously rare and nearly impossible to distinguish from plentiful imposters. Those who believe they possess one are generally mistaken.

To assure possession of the real thing, we can try to understand or develop our hierarchy from first principles instead of accepting it wholesale. This task is difficult, but possible – and is one of the fountainheads of innovation, progress, and competitive advantage.

But even possession of a truly coherent hierarchy turns out to be insufficient for propagating it. We can only turn insights into systems that empower the multitude with magic. Or we can deploy them in concert with the few who understand. Both eventually decohere.

The above discussion establishes why universal convergence is impossible; why effective efforts are necessarily limited in time, scope, or scale; and why the world must remain imperfect. But a lingering suspicion may remain that these limitations aren’t inherent: that we may be able to transcend them with advancements in education, science, or technology.

In Magical Foundations of Agreement I attempt to put the nail in the coffin of convergence by detailing why these limitations are theoretically inescapable. I show that the first principles on which coherent hierarchies rest are always disputable and that the methods used to express and resolve such disputes are themselves grounded in their own disputable principles. Our positions ultimately rest on faith.

Furthermore, even we if agreed to converge on any single set of principles, models, and methods, its massive size and bootstrapping challenges would require for the whole set to be accepted simultaneously and instantaneously by everyone. Even if this feat were somehow possible, the resulting acceptance wouldn’t be stable because of human variability. And even if such stable convergence were achieved, destabilizing tensions between goals would remain. I conclude by dismissing the refusal to choose sides.

Brief History of Absolute Belief

So the truths on which we base our beliefs and agreements ultimately rest on faith in axioms and thus can always be disputed. But agreement is essential for coordinated action and absolute belief in our foundations is vital for our effectiveness, goodness, identity, and sense of meaning.

The arguments I presented aren’t new. For much of human existence my laws would scarcely need articulation – nor were they contradictory. Tribes, casts, and city-states took it for granted that absolute beliefs were intrinsic to one’s role. With ancestry, birthplace, or shared experience underneath group loyalty, there were few means, and little desire, to convince or assimilate outsiders. And polytheism reaffirmed inevitability of variety, tension, and competition.

Monotheistic religions offered a universally correct answer and, with the rise of Christianity, a path to transcend the beliefs of one’s birth. Absolute belief morphed into belief in absolutes. Faith replaced acceptance of tension and provided a path – and later an imperative – to seek convergence.

The Enlightenment attempted to transcend faith – to replace belief in absolutes with absolute truths. As confidence in its methods increased, so did the willingness to dismantle existing beliefs, no matter how sacred, in pursuit of such truths. Belief in the value of absolute belief was itself opened to inquiry and became its casualty.

With time, as Alasdair MacIntyre argues brilliantly in After Virtue, critiques have come full circle to expose contradictions in every possible path to truth. Belief regained acceptance, but only in the temperamental and weak purview of individual choice. Furthermore, it now conflicted with products of millennia of striving towards universal convergence. The Laws of Absolute Belief and Plurality grew disputable and paradoxical.

This evolution left us with a rich body of sophisticated arguments and positions. Although rarely expanded fully in everyday discourse, these arguments aren’t unfamiliar any more than they are new.

Contemporary debates frequently condition solutions on agreement. Arguments commonly depend on absoluteness of truth or morality or justice. At the same time, attacks on absolutes are a legion. Foundations of existing beliefs are routinely exposed as shaky, often viciously and indiscriminately. The importance of such beliefs to effectiveness, motivation, morality, creativity, and happiness is downplayed or denied. Yet absolute belief is commonly vilified as dangerous precisely because of its terrifying effectiveness. Surprisingly frequently, arguments along all these lines are pursued by the same individuals; a feat made possible by instinctive management of cognitive dissonance with techniques like compartmentalization and, ultimately, by absolute belief in the privileged position of one’s truths and trade-offs.

Serenity with Plurality

Arguments for absolute belief or agreement, as well as arguments for their impossibility or danger or arbitrariness, can be deep, interesting, and important. But wise conclusions must balance, not choose between, these positions, because both reveal essential truths despite being in unresolvable tension.

The essence of wisdom is the caliber of such balancing of opposing truths. The essence of tragedy is the delicacy and inconsistency of any such balance.

My favorite encapsulation of the profundity of tension and essence of wisdom is the Serenity Prayer:1The Serenity Prayer is the inspiration for GrowWiser’s “To know the difference” tagline.

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.”

I contend that an unchangeable thing to accept is existence of disagreement and, by extension, existence of conflicting goals, beliefs, and groups. Yet this acceptance must not sacrifice courageous striving on which individual flourishing and societal progress depend.

Human beings did not evolve to perform such an elaborate balancing act and I am skeptical of our capacity for it. The magnitude of the psychological challenge is evident with existential depression. David Chapman’s interpretation of Robert Kegan’s stages of adult development, with its nihilistic valley at stage 4.5, offers another insightful perspective.2David Chapman’s Meaningness project, along with the referenced post, significantly overlap with the ideas I tried to develop in this series. If my words are confusing, you might find clarity in his. But unnaturalness and difficulty don’t make acceptance any less necessary for those committed to seek truth or maximize large-scale effectiveness. Which isn’t to say that everyone must seek truth or act outside their group and thus traverse the stages.

If acceptance of plurality seems obvious or easy – rather than a terrifying gateway to detachment, nihilism, or relativism – then think about what makes you argue, strive, and sacrifice; what makes you proud, ashamed, and furious; what you find good, evil, sacred, and just. Then consider whether you’d have no trouble accepting your own inverse; whether you could continue unperturbed if you both got comparable rewards and recognition.

Acceptance of plurality doesn’t allow exceptions. Nothing rises to veracity insusceptible to legitimate, good-faith disagreement: not rationality, not ethics, not objectivity, not faith. It is in tension with action because we build ourselves on top of such absolute beliefs.

I presented my tension-balancing synthesis in Plurality of Absolutes. This series was its elaboration and defense.

The Plurality of Absolutes mindset accepts the multitude of conflicting groups with serenity; it places no hope in their elimination and thus limits efforts to correct, consolidate, or improve others. Yet it unabashedly supports courageous pursuit of absolutes within the confines of such groups and does not require acceptance of plurality from those within this limit.

Groups accept existence of conflicting efforts, begrudgingly but peacefully, as inevitable constraints and allow their relative merits to emerge in amoral competition through markets and politics. The feverish desire to push one’s truth beyond this limit is tamed – with the help of intra-group norms, in-group guardians, and inter-group competition – by recognition of the impossibility of convergence.

I believe Plurality of Absolutes to be both a realistic model of how the world works and a justifiable escape hatch from philosophical conundrums into healthy action.

In Defense of Argument and Action

I want to preempt being misconstrued as asserting futility of all striving for agreement.

Two people – whether friends, enemies, or strangers – attempting to move a couch up the stairs can definitely agree on who should take the front and who the back and it would be quite useful for them to do so. It is when they attempt to define the relative amount of recognition due to each of their contributions, or make their conclusions universal, that they risk descending into unresolvable conflicts. Similarly, communities – whether aligned, competitive, or indifferent – can come together for pragmatic ends, or for shared principles, but risk trouble if they attempt to trace such high-level agreement to common axioms.

Such coming together is how communities form. Arguments and ideas, along with practical pressures and their interpretations, drive people to find common ground and build cooperative enterprises. But this consensus is only stable at a sufficiently high level of abstraction and functional communities invariably build protections from pushing it too far: modesty, manners, rituals, agreeing to disagree, unquestionable truths, chain-of-command, and checks on busybodies are some examples.

My argument is not that proof is impossible, that all positions are equal, or that striving for truth is as good as not. My contention, simply put, is that positions are axiomatic systems.3Robert G. Brown expands on the same claim in his draft of Axioms. While axioms can always be rejected, proof is possible within any accepted axiom set. Furthermore – outside of purely theoretical constructs, like those within mathematics – positions are grounded in real-world truths, even if we access them through systems of belief. Positions can thus, at minimum, be judged by internal coherence and external performance.

To strive for truth is to work to understand one’s axioms, validate coherence, and test effectiveness. Within every axiomatic system, those who strive this way will have advantages over those who don’t. Not only because of resulting competence, but because our beliefs must rest on perception of absolute – or defensible, for those beyond Keagan’s stage 4 – truth to motivate meaningfully. This perception is fragile in proportion to being imaginary, making both realism and confidence valuable. Continued questioning of even the most accepted principles is an essential realism aid. But since it is endless and demotivating, one must be able to disengage from it to put its lessons to use.

Unsurprisingly, once interactions turn competitive, arguments rarely remain good faith. They are propaganda – one of the amoral weapons of inter-group competition and intra-group guidance. As such, far from being useless, they are an essential tool in pragmatic action, but must not be mistaken for good-faith, truth-seeking debate.

All belief and action rest on principles that can be challenged and expose consequences that may be undesirable. Even with most thoroughly developed positions, it eventually becomes necessary to choose sides in order to judge or act. The bar to re-engage chosen principles must then rise, especially when neither competence nor good faith of the objectors can be reliably ascertained. The decision to revisit them ought to come from internal suspicion that positions have been undermined rather than external demands for elaboration.

Many reasons compelled me to write this series. Significant among them was to provide a generic defense against demands for positions to be proven or reconciled beyond all limits: to give actors the tools to confidently assert – to themselves and others – that their positions don’t need to satisfy all the objections to be defensible – indeed, that they cannot – so that, with pride and courage, they can instead act.

Our incredulity rises when we are asked why we care. Why does existence of different beliefs, projects, and people concern us even when they are too abstract, remote, or tangential to our practical actions? And not just concern us, but interrupts, demotivates, and redirects our efforts?

Effectiveness of Execution

Clarity of purpose is an essential source of psychological energy. At the moment of execution, all action relies on it – and we abridge our action hierarchies, at least temporary, as much as is needed to achieve it.

We presume our capabilities to be sufficient and our models to be true even when we intuit complexity in the task and magic in our understanding. We accept visions and justifications even when we realize they can be questioned. We treat goals and plans as settled even when we know there are alternatives.

It cannot be otherwise if we are to execute: we’d learn, practice, evaluate, adjust, and reevaluate forever. The provisional faith in the rest of the hierarchy at the moment of execution makes action possible. Greater certitude in the correctness of this faith fosters more motivated, effective, and persistent action.

When action involves other people, or concerns shared goals, clarity of purpose presupposes agreement. To act we rely on models of the world, our group, and other individuals. We rely on laws, customs, and commitments. And we rely on others sharing such beliefs with us. We act within group standards and towards group goals under the assumption that others agree on their superiority.

Disagreement pollutes individual clarity, but the effect on collective action compounds beyond the sum of individual demotivation. Agreement is the lubricant of cooperation. It helps us to trust people, to model their actions, to allocate resources, to forecast the future.

Without agreement we have to question good faith, competence, and understanding of others in every interaction. We are reluctant to share, sacrifice, and expose vulnerabilities. We pull in different directions: competing and hiding instead of cooperating, putting individual goals above shared ones, looking for ways to protect ourselves or gain an advantage.

Viability of Strategy

Agreement solves the coordination problem, reduces transaction costs, encourages sacrifice, and energizes individual action – all of which compound effectiveness of shared action for each participant. And it allows us to use the simplest, most direct, and most efficient strategies, which further aid clarity and effectiveness by being easy to understand, believe, and implement.

Once we cannot rely on good faith agreement, strategies explode in complexity: defensive checks and balances that stymie progress, competitive approaches that duplicate effort, explicit rules that ossify, bureaucracies that coopt trust, education that morphs into propaganda, incentives that backfire, compromises that sacrifice the long-run…

But disagreement doesn’t just make for more complex and less efficient strategies. The simple strategies are often the only ones that appear to be viable. We believe that our goals are achievable and our sacrifices are warranted because such strategies exist.

Disagreement pressures doers into skepticism, hope into apathy, goodness into selfishness, cooperation into competition, and righteousness into fanaticism.

Defensibility of Goals

Still, why do we care about agreement even with those who aren’t involved in our pursuits?

Disagreement seeds confusion, distraction, and inefficiency. It leads to competition for desired resources. Action is certainly simpler without it. But it’s also simpler without other constraints. Why is it so difficult to treat disagreement as just another constraint?

In part because agreement is the obvious path to dissolve most other constraints. And in part because we know that human beliefs, no matter how strongly held, are not absolute in the same way that laws of nature or physical resources are. They were formed through experience and can be reformed through it.

Why can’t we just isolate ourselves from disagreement? In part because action tends to be too interconnected. It is costly, if not impossible, to isolate the commons, but we cannot idly allow dissenters to access areas we seek to protect or improve lest they appropriate contributions intended for the commons or become comparatively stronger from our sacrifices.

And in part because our most precious goals tend to have universal foundations and global aspirations so there might not actually be anyone who is completely uninvolved – merely those who aren’t involved directly, or significantly, or immediately, but nevertheless threaten our mission if they remain so. Their committed existence alone attacks the absolutes that ground our goals.

The very concept of progress rests on agreement on what is better, if not best. This agreement not only motivates action, but mitigates and justifies its risks.

As is passionately pointed out by reactionaries of every era, change breaks things and makes dangers and abuses possible on hitherto unprecedented scale. What emboldens us to proceed despite the risks is faith in the goodness of change and in the ability to mitigate the dangers. And this faith rests, almost invariably, on some combination of agreement and moral fortitude.

The good people among us have a duty to follow the agreed upon path. Those who bring change into the world, or who best understand it, have to use their moral sensibilities to restrict undesirable uses of knowledge, technologies, or social structures: scholars have a moral responsibility for the consequences of their ideas, scientists for their inventions, technologists for their creations. And the rest of us have a responsibility to expose and contain abuses that escape.

If both agreement and moral duty are denied, or made practically difficult, then the entire enterprise of progressive solution seeking – whether through knowledge, freedom, science, technology, prosperity, democracy, or ethics – turns from conscientious to reckless, from optimistic to frightening, from wise perseverance to naive stubbornness, from noble altruism to selfish curiosity. It can no longer be justified as unambiguously superior to the alternatives. And every person who disagrees makes this outcome more real.

Foundation of Identity

Disagreement is far more personal and consequential than an attack on a particular action hierarchy or even on the concept of progress.

Our identity pursues a vision of worth, integrity, justice, and recognition. These concepts come to be defined, measured, and pursued through action for external visions, such as those of our community or its potential replacements. These visions are accepted by being justified to be true, ethical, and desirable beyond alternatives and thus the best way for us to be a good and worthy person. Our sense of meaning and worth, and our individual and communal effectiveness, are tied to these justifications. Our identity becomes enmeshed with external visions as we learn, work, and sacrifice within their constraints.

When disagreement challenges justifications of our action hierarchies, it simultaneously challenges the universal foundations and global aspirations that guide and inspire us. It attacks the perception of their unambiguous superiority which grounds our moral fortitude, perseverance, and sense of meaning.

Those justifications validate our identity. Therefore disagreement assaults our goodness. We relied on them to make sacrifices and set expectations for future rewards. Therefore disagreement threatens our due. We depended on them to choose skills to master and sphere of influence to develop. Therefore disagreement trivializes our capability and worth.

It takes a long time for us to accept that foundations of our identity are really being challenged. Though our pride may react violently to insults latent in disagreement, we tend to be as unaware of contingent circumstances of our truths as we are of the air we breathe: valid disagreements about them strike us as unbelievable.

We justify individual sacrifice with appeals to successful execution. We justify coordinated execution with appeals to effective strategy. We justify compliance with strategy with appeals to worthy goals. We justify desirability of goals with appeals to shared values, models, and desires. When our justifications are insufficient, we fault our skill or understanding. Then we blame skill or understanding of others. Then we condemn individual ethics. Then systems at ever-larger scopes.

Although we ostensibly argue about external action hierarchies, we feel compelled to argue because goodness and truth are at stake. We learn what is good by accepting communal agreements, we prove ourselves good by acting within them, and we become good by internalizing, living, and defending their sacredness.

How can we allow unethical ideas to pass unresisted in action or in speech without silencing what has become our conscience? How can we not rebel against unfairness or insults without silencing our sense of justice? How can we not demand due recognition without silencing our sense of dignity? And if we do, what distinguishes us from those who never developed such moral senses in the first place? How can we then prove ourselves good? How can we retain faith in our identity’s vision? And from where are we to derive meaning, purpose, and energy?

The feelings, habits, and incentives that compel us to convince, even when it makes no practical difference, are the same feelings, habits, and incentives that compel us to act ethically even when it is against our obvious self interest, and are the same feelings, habits, and incentives that compel us to pursue virtuous ends even when they are distant, uncertain, expensive, or dangerous. As such, they are responsible for great adventures, noble deeds, daring pursuits, and extraordinary accomplishments. And they are grounded in the presumption of absolute truth and the possibility of agreement.

]]>https://www.growwiser.com/2017/01/29/significance-of-agreement/feed/3Ingredients of Actionhttps://www.growwiser.com/2016/11/04/ingredients-of-action/
https://www.growwiser.com/2016/11/04/ingredients-of-action/#respondFri, 04 Nov 2016 20:05:12 +0000http://www.growwiser.com/?p=269Continue reading Ingredients of Action→]]>All action demands purpose and energy – a goal and a means to move towards it. This is as true psychologically as it is physically: we need the will to act.

Of course, energy doesn’t miraculously convert to goals with perfect efficiency. There are skills, challenges, beliefs, plans, mistakes, realizations, justifications, adjustments… And these affect who we are, what we want, and what we are energized by. I propose that human action follows a complex feedback process akin to this:

Purpose and Energy

To the extent that this recursive process has a beginning, action begins with our most direct source of goals: desires and duties.

Goals seem to energize simply by existing: we are lured by rewards, excited by opportunities, and roused by fears. The word motivation alludes to this connection: it can mean the reason and/or the will to act.

The amount of bundled energy is proportionate to the desirability of the goal and the clarity of the path to it. We don’t need an elaborate model to explain what energizes us to walk across the kitchen for a cookie, or stand in line for a freebie, or sprint away from danger.

Complex actions may be comparably self-sufficient if we can partition them into clear chunks: if each subgoal provides enough energy for its own achievement then we may need nothing else to progress towards distant goals.

Energy brought by goals is supplemented with energy supplied by their achievement. Success is intrinsically rewarding which invigorates us to complete the task and begin another.

How much energy we harvest from goals and accomplishments depends on how well we optimize action to provide clarity, avoid resistance, and generate wins. Such ability to create effective action hierarchies depends on the quality of our models and capabilities – on competence.

Competence energizes us indirectly by saving focus and energy that would be spent on dreams and dread, by partitioning the task into manageable chunks that bring a series of successes, by giving clarity and confidence, and by reducing resistance. Concurrently, competence increases the probability of achieving flow, which is not only a psychological energy equivalent of riding the thermals, but also a deeply satisfying experience that encourages action.

However, clarity and competence can only get us so far. Even if we successfully hack plans into a maximally motivating arrangement of small, clear goals; eliminate avoidable mistakes; and relish in the use of our skills, overcoming resistance will often demand more. Eventually, we reach the limits of our models and capabilities and face unavoidable uncertainty, adversity, and toil. Eventually, significant goals require additional sources of energy.

Perseverance is our deepest energy reserve. It is a habit of not giving up that lowers action energy requirements. It is a skill in overcoming obstacles that energizes like other forms of competence. Finally, it is a meta-capability that is integrated with our identity: its energy reserves are proportionate to its significance to our self-valuation.

The desire to succeed isn’t the only thing: other values and aspirations restrict the methods we consider appropriate and goals we consider worthwhile. We want to be a good person who strives for true, desirable, possible ends. A system of thought that defines such long-term goals, justifies them, and coheres them with identity is our vision.

Visions give us the faith to persevere through resistance and doubt. They interact with desires and duties to direct and motivate us. They are powerful, overarching, and ostensibly certain and clear.

The simplicity and cohesiveness we feel tends to turn subtle and amorphous with attempts at precise articulation, yet we continue to easily recognize those actions that fit into our vision and those that contradict it.

This intuitive recognition of fit between action, identity, and vision is inspiration. It is our final source of energy.

The most powerful aspect of inspiration is its ability to refuel perseverance by justifying the necessity and value of effort and connecting it with identity. The perseverance machinery then works with competence to provide the required perspiration or exhaust itself trying.

Resistance and Success

Successful effort rewards us with the attainment of our goal – a satisfied desire, a discharged duty, a step towards our vision – as well as with the pleasure of triumph itself. But effects extend beyond the immediate rewards and pleasures.

Success validates the models used to create action hierarchies and skills used to execute them which grows confidence. It vindicates perseverance which strengthens resolve.

Accomplishment, confidence, influence, and resolve swell our identity which grows our capacity to be inspired and fight through resistance.

Failure can turn this virtuous cycle against us. Our confidence shrinks and our identity becomes less tied to accomplishment. The extent to which this happens depends on how we interpret and respond to failure – which itself depends on the clarity of our vision and the strength of our identity. The attitude towards effort is therefore path dependent and increasingly stable.

Visions and Identity

Our system remains incomplete. It omits explicit connections of competence and influence with self-worth; of models, capabilities, desires, and duties with identity; of truth and goodness with models; and so on. It is focused on a specific action, pursued to achieve a specific goal that is rooted in a specific vision, but we pursue a variety of goals from different visions.

To relieve these deficiencies, we can assign a separate instance of the framework to each vision and construe every action as an iteration within such an instance.

Visions depend on, as well as develop, distinct sets of models, skills, values, and expectations, though some of the components end up identical between instances. This component sharing exposes each instance to unpredictable external influences: skill improvements in one instance may affect execution in others; models created in one pursuit may challenge justifications in another.

Such de facto interactions couple instances:

The most interesting instance is that of our identity. Identity’s vision most often completes the missing connections: competence or influence or truth or goodness are frequently its direct goals. Moreover, it is uniquely essential to all the others – connected to them like the center instance in the diagram above.

Bootstrapping

Early action commences with a barebones instance. Humans begin with no duties and infinitesimal capabilities, but an infinitely grand identity: that of being God-like. This implies unquestionably true, good, and possible desires; a vision of their willful fulfillment; and boundless contempt for resistance.

The infant’s ostensibly infinite energy is rooted in flawless clarity. Their action is perfectly inspired – without uncertainty or disconnect between motivation, vision, or identity. This allows desire and identity to provide all the purpose and energy a budding human needs – to bootstrap action.

Action drives evolution from solipsism to social being by advancing models and capabilities. Explicit justifications replace implicit ones, visions sprout, duties are accepted, and a mature, interconnected set of instances emerges.

So identity’s vision is not only separate from the others and essential to all of them. It is the fountainhead of other pursuits.

Identity’s Vision

In other words, action is bootstrapped by basic desires like comfort, knowledge, and volition energized by a primal form of pride unconcerned with comparison – what Rousseau called amour de soi.

Pride – the sense of importance, capability, worth – is the linchpin of identity’s vision.

In initial solipsism, pride is content without explicit goals of its own. It pursues worth implicitly by doing the bidding of other desires, thus energizing early action. It is validated by overcome obstacles, acquired capabilities, and increased understanding.

As identity matures, its vision becomes intertwined with external visions and our self-valuation becomes more dependent on performance within these visions. We remain proud of our achievements, competence, and goodness, but are no longer satisfied with self-evaluation: we must be measured and recognized externally. Pride acquires explicit goals of its own: to push identity to improve and assure it a fair valuation.

It may seem objectionable to elevate pride to such importance. Indeed, pride is a complex and imperfect term that is difficult to define precisely enough to rank unequivocally. Nevertheless, its primacy over alternatives is tenable.

Throughout history, philosophers have found it necessary to separate out, define, and defend what I am calling pride. Consider the following quote from Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man:

“Over the millennia, there has been no consistent word used to refer to the psychological phenomenon of the ‘desire for recognition’; Plato spoke of thymos, or ‘spiritedness’, Machiavelli of man’s desire for glory, Hobbes of his pride or vainglory, Rousseau of his amour-propre, Alexander Hamilton of the love of fame and James Madison of ambition, Hegel of recognition, and Nietzsche of man as the ‘beast with red cheeks.’ All of these terms refer to that part of man which feels the need to place value on things – himself in the first instance, but on the people, actions, or things around him as well.”

There is a wealth of insight in these philosophical efforts, but two lessons suffice: there is no obvious, framework-independent term; and the privileged status of pride, by whatever name, is defensible.

External visions guide the direction of our efforts and the metrics with which we measure competence and goodness. We come to value goals, judgements, and obligations of communal visions. We sacrifice time, effort, and desires to further them. We want to be recognized for our commitment to their values; for our ability to advance their goals; for our contributions, efforts, and sacrifices.

We become enmeshed with external visions, but are never completely subsumed by them. Our identity remains distinct with its own proud goals of worth, integrity, justice, and recognition.

Rewards and Truth

We prioritize communal goals over individual ones when we are convinced that they are more ethical, correct, or important – which makes performance within them a better measure of our worth. Grander visions substantiate greater merit which engenders more motivation and legitimizes bigger sacrifices.

But only if we believe such visions to be sufficiently true, complete, coherent, and effective. The perceived truth of justifications is the backbone on which our buy-in rests.

Visions of community and identity are connected by shared models that justify them both. When the community embraces goals, values, and explanations it also commits to a compatible valuation of individuals and their actions – which guides identity’s vision. This valuation manifests as a commensurate distribution of rewards and recognition.

When external reality matches our understanding and external recognition matches our estimation, the visions of community and identity feel true and in sync – and we can sometimes act with clarity and inspiration of an infant. But when conflicts arise, we feel confused, cheated, and tempted to assert our independent interests – which drains purpose and energy.

Communal buy-in predisposes us to trust the community and to temper our desires for the “greater good”. But rewards validate both identity and truth. Perceived unfairness doesn’t just sting pride; it challenges the foundations of goodness and truth that legitimize communal visions, justify individual duties, and inspire.

As such experiences mount, we become increasingly reluctant to sacrifice for communal visions. This lowers their effectiveness which compounds doubt. Deterioration of communal vision intensifies the attack on identity. Moreover, it challenges the justifications for past sacrifices which urges pride to seek retribution: being made a sucker is perhaps the only affront greater than inadequate recognition.

Anything that points out flaws in communal visions can challenge the basis for individual motivation and sense of worth and initiate this destructive cycle, though it often begins with an insult to pride. Conversely, anything that grows confidence in external visions can enhance individual energy and dignity and improve the vision’s effectiveness. The visions of identity and the external world are intimately connected.

]]>https://www.growwiser.com/2016/11/04/ingredients-of-action/feed/0Emergence of Identity and Beliefhttps://www.growwiser.com/2016/08/16/emergence-of-identity-and-belief/
https://www.growwiser.com/2016/08/16/emergence-of-identity-and-belief/#respondTue, 16 Aug 2016 20:52:41 +0000http://www.growwiser.com/?p=246Continue reading Emergence of Identity and Belief→]]>I’d like to explore early development of action hierarchy components with a narrative about a budding human being. I hope that an intuition, however faint, will emerge for how these components co-evolve with identity; how those crucial meta-capabilities develop; how the seeds of fairness and goodness sprout; and how everything ties together to motivate directed action. Let’s begin in the beginning.

Solipsism in the Womb

The fetus assumes that they are the purpose of the universe, if not the universe itself. This perspective fits the facts they have encountered. It also happens to carry a good deal of truth: the placenta bestows upon the fetus a singular amount of authoritarian control thus enthroning them as the all-powerful, all-important lord of their small world.

Fulfillment of their desires is imperative, but by no means simple. The universe may be their servant or even their extension, but it does not grant control over itself by magic. It only yields when it is treated right. The fetus must comply with the world’s demands before they can expect its obedience.

To comprehend what they must do and develop the skills to do it, the fetus depends on inductive learning, with its assumption of a consistent causal relationship between action and consequence.

They start out extraordinarily weak. Their senses deluge their understanding and their intentions overwhelm their capabilities. But self-importance pushes them through innumerable failures and tireless repetitions towards comprehension and competence.

Success establishes the concept of desert through a restatement of causality: consequences are owed to actions. They deserve compliance from the world because they’ve earned it.

Each time the fetus compels the universe to satisfy their demands they gain not only entitlement and competence, but confidence in their supremacy. The powerful forces that resisted them prove to be theirs to command. Their low starting point only reinforces their certitude via accumulation of triumphs.

Attained models and skills help the fetus develop new ones. General methods for learning and succeeding evolve from specific efforts. Their sphere of influence expands at an accelerating rate.

They still encounter plentiful resistance, but are sure that mastery is merely a matter of additional effort. Their certainty of having God-like totality and power only increases with time. Until, one day, everything changes.

Encounter with Necessity

The fetus has accepted limitations on methods, but not on goals. Birth introduces the magnitude of necessity1I use the word necessity with a nod to Emile: or On Education by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. to them with unceremonious harshness.

The universe rebels against its lord. The fetus is pushed out by forces that are orders of magnitude more powerful and disobedient than they considered possible. Their efforts and plights go unnoticed, their confidence crumbles, their pride is crushed. Their powerful models and capabilities are proven woefully insufficient.

The harsh forces of necessity only keep coming: gravity, light, heat, cold, pain, motion, hunger. On the day of their birth, the infant learns of a much larger, less responsive, and more mysterious universe. They are confused and concerned, but they do discover benefits and opportunities.

They locate warmth and food. They experience strangely familiar motions and sounds. Necessity, after its show of immense strength, recedes. More content and optimistic, they rest. Perhaps this universe is more orderly, caring, and open to control than early trauma suggested.

Cautiously, the infant attempts to apply the methods that worked in the womb: experimentation, pattern matching, inference, repetition. The world proves accommodating. The infant’s confidence rebounds and their understanding and abilities improve.

They won’t again believe that they can bend anything to their will. The new world relentlessly asserts its authority by thwarting them with baffling forces. But the infant’s sense of self-importance recovers. They are not quite God, but perhaps the universe still exists for them. Perhaps the trauma of birth was a mistake. Or, perhaps, it was a benevolent act to usher them into this larger world.

How far back towards God-like self-conception the infant ventures depends on how well they are able to get the new world to fulfill their wishes.

The infant has no reliable method to distinguish the impossible from the possible, to differentiate unavoidable failures from ones due to insufficient effort or understanding, or to mistakes in execution or strategy. They only have a single heuristic: the forces of necessity never yield.

How hard the infant tries depends on how consistently they are resisted and on how powerful they perceive themselves to be. If they’ve been thwarted too often, or too painfully, they will assume necessity sooner and yield. If they’ve succeeded often, they will not only try longer, but, even after yielding, will return to re-engage with new approaches as their understanding evolves.

Discovery of Other Beings

Social forces dominate the postpartum world, but the infant doesn’t discern other wills in their self-centered universe. They only recognize whether forces are manipulatable, and therefore can serve them, or are constraints that need to be endured. And they can only make this categorization through rebellion. Anything consistent and unyielding is indistinguishable from necessity and will be accepted as such – at least until the baby’s skills and models improve enough to justify the next rebellion.

The baby begins to perceive the wills of other beings by noticing a category of interactions that are neither consistently unyielding nor reliably manipulatable.

The infant has no innate, overarching preference for doing something over commanding it done. Both are potentially valid strategies and they learn to prefer the more effective one. They detect correlations between cries, movements, or thoughts and outcomes. Those evolve into implicit agreements to deliver the same outcomes on demand.

When this compliance is withheld the infant’s fury knows no bounds. Their rage isn’t disappointment at discovery of necessity, or recognition of insufficient competence, or frustration of repeated failure, or expression of pain: it is their nascent pride rebelling at the injustice of being cheated of its due.

The baby has experienced such anger frequently. It is difficult to turn a chaotic sensory stream into valid models of the world so there have been many prematurely assumed victories. But they detect a crucial distinction with some interactions: their fury affects outcomes.

Neither battles against necessity nor manipulation using flawed models were ever influenced by the baby’s disappointment. They’ve proven consistent, even if initially appearing otherwise. But these curious forces are not only inconsistent, but are influenced by the baby’s state of mind!

It is by identifying inconsistency and sensitivity to rebellion that the baby learns to distinguish the wills of others from ordinary forces. From this time forward, the baby needs to differentiate between insufficient competence, futile necessity, and uncooperative wills. Fury evolves from an emotion to also become a method of differentiation and a strategy for victory.

Battles of Will

The baby’s newfound awareness is too vague to fully distinguish between social and physical forces. They are equally willing to accept unyielding necessity of either kind. But the discovered utility of fury triggers a wave of battles as the baby hones their new tactic and reevaluates their models of the world with it. They do what they have always done: act relentlessly to identify necessity and perfect their skills.

The difference is that this time the brunt of their assault is faced by human beings who care about them. The caretakers construe complaints as genuine distress and inflame the problem with their attempts to help. They reinforce the usefulness of fury which leads the baby to redouble their efforts. And they bestow benefits on the baby who perceives a variety of new entitlements; future failures to honor them engender righteous indignation and yet more fury.

With experience, the baby begins to recognize specific individuals and perceive responsiveness to fury as one of their properties. Although they did not begin with an attack on, or even recognition of, any one will, they end up regarding responsiveness of particular individuals as an entitlement. Any disobedience justifies indignation.

Eventually, the child comprehends personhood sufficiently to realize that responsiveness of even the most unyielding individual is not a force of necessity, but an act of will. The child perceives an affront to their significance. They rebel to assert their dominion. The ensuing battles of will become their major occupation for some time.

A Good Person

The child wants others to be their obedient tools, but lacks a realistic understanding of dominion, much less a long-term strategy to achieve it. They fall back on their well-worn method of stubborn rebellion by asserting themselves at every opportunity. The specifics of what happens next depend on the caretakers, but some broadly similar experiences, in varying sequences and proportions, tend to occur.

The child wins their share of battles. Many of their victories amount to recognition of their autonomy rather than surrender to their authority: they select a choice or enter an agreement instead of obeying.

Some victories reveal the child’s shortcomings. They win, but find their demands to have been against their own interests. They perceive wisdom and care behind their caretaker’s guidance.

And some battles, whether victorious or not, backfire to expose the cost of conflict. Friction infiltrates areas where they didn’t ask for it. Resistance to requests rises. Usual assistance is withheld. Increasingly powerful weapons are deployed. Secured victories and reached agreements are challenged anew. The child discerns the interconnectedness of social forces and the expense of tyranny.

Social demands are not necessity in the absolute sense of physical laws, but resemble necessity in proportion to the price they levy on disobedience. The child elects cooperation when it appears to be more effective than rebellion.

This initial cooperation is similar to the contracts they’ve made with the physical world: compliance with social demands gets them treated as a good person who is owed their due. But it is also different because the physical world doesn’t negotiate, accept promises, nor demand or offer recognition of autonomy.

The child is a good person in only the most basic sense. Their intentions aren’t noble and their actions aren’t necessary good in any conventional sense. Good is what satisfies the requirements to get rewarded.

This self-centered definition of goodness is essentially automatic and tautological: few goals can be reached without satisfying requirements of some sort. But it is justified and earned, which is a big step from goodness rendered superfluous by God-like self-conception.

Being good in the social world advances understanding of agreements, fairness, desert, reciprocity, and empathy. It takes time and experience for the child to comprehend these concepts.

They interpret attempts to hold them to their promises as domination – or attempt to dominate with noncompliance – thus triggering new battles of will. But eventually they grasp the two-sided nature of agreements: how they constrain both themselves and others over both time and space. They internalize the value of trust and the unfairness of reneging on one’s obligations.

Trustworthiness fosters agreements, which makes it valuable. It can be objectively evaluated over many actions and thus be recognized as a property of a person. It is often against immediate self interest and is thus expensive, which makes it important that it be accurately recognized. The duty to keep one’s promises elevates goodness to something that can be consciously pursued, externally recognized, and explicitly defended.

As recognition rises in importance, the child’s acknowledgement of trustworthiness, competence, wisdom, and care in others also increases. They desire to identify people worthy of respect and emulation. They show deference. Battles of will still flare up, but increasingly over insufficient recognition of goodness or competence rather than pure power.

The experience with negotiation and honoring of agreements, together with explanations of trusted people, reveal that social demands carry an internal logic that can be evaluated for fairness, coherence, and effectiveness. It becomes possible to consider, debate, and accept agreements on their own merits rather than solely through adversarial negotiation. It becomes evident that social demands can allow everyone to get more of what they want through conflict resolution, trust and understanding, long-term cooperation, and greater effectiveness. Thus justified, perception of agreements advances from begrudgingly effectual to optimistically desirable.

A Social Being

Rules and agreements are two sides of the same coin. The child recognizes that societal rules, like smaller-scale family agreements, have reasons for their existence. The child was not involved in making those rules, but is now biased towards viewing them as beneficial rather than oppressive. They consider themselves a part of a community, with shared goals and responsibilities.

The moral dimension of goodness advances past self-interested trustworthiness when individual actions are connected to success of a community that has been deemed good.

The child sees that everyone in the community benefits from positive contributions. They see good people make such contributions. They perceive reneging on responsibilities as an unfair taking advantage of shared contributions and as a violation of trust. They intuit that their own development has been made possible by the community.

The desire to be fair and trustworthy, to emulate good people, to repay the debt to the community, and to further shared goals justify being a good person as a worthy goal, a point of pride, and a linchpin of identity.

Of course, such genuine buy-in isn’t inevitable. The child’s views are a consequence of the interactions between their preferences and experiences. Many paths favor less social stages of goodness with a possible veneer of sociability.

Neither is the extent of communal buy-in a given. At this point, the child is still primarily a self-centered being driven by their own desires. It’s just that a portion of their desires is now connected with other people and externally justified goodness. There is plenty of space for purely individual pursuits and for participation in multiple communities.

The child’s understanding has progressed from resting on implications of solipsism to relying on increasingly empirical justifications. Goodness evolved to be justified by action, truth by accuracy, power by effectiveness. Identity has to be built and recognition needs to be earned. Duties and communal goals can be prioritized over individual desires.

The child’s self-perception has advanced from complete self-absorption to a hub in a network connected by duties, expectations, agreements, and trust. This network, defended by an interconnected web of justifications, provides the building blocks for a holistic, self-reinforcing worldview.

It starts out small and simple, but expands rapidly through productive interaction with individual development. Healthy networks direct and enhance skill attainment; offer reasonable models to root identity and understanding in; and reward goodness, progress, and contribution.

The child enjoys the recognition and rewards bestowed upon them for their achievements. They see their competence and influence rise. They feel their self-worth grow. Their advancement validates the effectiveness of their approach and the wisdom of their community.

The child’s increasing competence and sphere of influence engages them in more interesting, complex, and meaningful projects. The expanding quantity and diversity of assertions and interactions exposes conflicts. The child is compelled to grow and rework their models to maintain coherence in their enlarged set of ideas, goals, and commitments. This demands that they make choices, some of which involve sacrifices.

These decisions are made in small, logical steps and often appear obvious given the accepted network. They are expected to lead to recognition and rewards, increased effectiveness and confidence, attainment of truth and grand goals. Each justification rests on greater trust in the community and its members. Each acceptance merges the child deeper into the network and further aligns their desired pursuits with communal ones – which reinforces the cycle.

This interconnected process develops the child’s identity, goals, skills, models, meta-capabilities, and axioms. It fits them into a justifiable, self-reinforcing whole that motivates meaningful action. With time, the justifications and connections dissolve into magic, but the confident and capable identity remains to pursue the erected action hierarchies.